Overall, the Financial Conduct Authority – which reports on financial firm complaints every six months – found the number of gripes in the first half of the year fell by 2.1 per cent to 2.14million.
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The Payment Protection Insurance scandal, which has plagued banks with compensation claims worth billions, is finally starting to slow, data suggests today.
Despite the decline in PPI complaints, it was still the most complained about product in the first half of 2015 with a total of 883,043 complaints received.
PPI policies were supposed to protect borrowers against sickness or redundancy, but were often sold to those who would have been ineligible to claim.
Banks have had to fork out billions in payouts to those mis-sold PPI in the past.
However, within this, complaints about income drawdown – by which an individual takes a regular income from his or her pension pot each year – leapt by 87.8% to 1,341, compared with 714 during the previous six months.
This increase was mainly caused by a 21.8% rise in the number of complaints relating to the banking and credit card group of products.
Last month the Financial Ombudsman Service – which handles complaints that can not be resolved – said that the number of people unhappy about their packaged accounts had “shot up”.
PPI was the most complained about product, followed by current accounts with 506,326 complaints (up 31.2 per cent), “other” general insurance with 304,919 complaints (down 4.3 per cent), credit cards with 121,615 complaints (up 11.1 per cent) and savings including cash Isas, and other banking with 78,981 complaints (down 6.4 per cent).
Most complained about firms in the general insurance sector, including PPI, were Lloyds Bank, Barclays Bank, Bank of Scotland, MBNA, and HSBC.
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This is the first time PPI complaints have fallen below 1m per half-year period since 2012.
