On 30 March 2016, the FCA published a press release reporting that, between July and December 2015, financial services firms received 2.11 million new complaints.

Overall, there was a decrease of 1.4% in the number of complaints compared to the previous six months. This was mainly driven by a 10% drop in complaints about current accounts and a 15% drop in complaints about savings accounts. When payment protection insurance (PPI) is excluded, the number of complaints between July and December 2015 is reduced to 1.17 million.

The total redress paid to consumers fell to £1.97 billion between July and December 2015, which is slightly lower than the £1.98 billion paid between January and June 2015.

The press release advises that the FCA will be providing more contextualisation information in future complaints data publications and will be requiring firms to publish this on their own websites (rather than doing so on a recommended basis) from February 2017.

Read the press release = http://bit.ly/1V6vsdT

The press release links to:

• An FCA webpage summarising the latest complaints data, which includes a link to a table setting out additional complaints data. = http://bit.ly/25IvooD
• An FCA webpage linking to searchable tables containing the latest aggregate complaints data. = http://bit.ly/1XeugmG
• An FCA webpage linking to searchable tables containing the latest firm-level complaints data. = http://bit.ly/1uLqjrg