January to June 2022

Our H1 2022 results continue to show significant reductions in complaint volumes across Barclays UK year-on-year, largely driven by continued changes in customer behaviour, with customers interacting with us more through our digital channels.

• Excluding Payment Protection Insurance, we have seen an overall reduction in BUK complaints year-on-year vs H1-21 (16 per cent) and half-on-half vs H2-21 (6 per cent).
• We have seen the drop in BUK banking and credit card related complaints versus 2021 continue (down 14 per cent on H1-22 and 7 per cent on H2-21). This is largely due to customers interacting with us more through digital.
• We have seen a 23 per cent decline in complaints for Home Finance versus the first half of 2021 and a 5 per cent decrease vs second half of 2021. This is due to improved service offering following high demand caused by Payment Holiday requests during ‘Lockdowns’.

Samantha White, MD BUK Customer Care Channels, said: “It is essential that we provide our customers with the support and the high level of service they expect from us, which is why our colleagues continue to work tirelessly to improve our processes and customer service.

“It’s encouraging to see complaints reduce again both year-on-year and half-on-half, however, there’s always more that can be done and we won’t stop in our mission to create a perfect customer experience.”

We are one of the largest financial service providers in the UK, so it also makes sense to look at the numbers in the context of our size. For example, in the banking category, we received 7 per cent fewer complaints per 1,000 accounts than in H2 2021 and 13 per cent fewer than in H1 2021.

We remain absolutely committed to delivering excellent customer experiences and exceeding what our customers expect from their bank.

The Data Explained

The complaint tables below provide a breakdown of all complaints made to Barclays between January and June 2022.

The complaints data is segmented across the six FCA product categories. The FCA also require firms to quote the complaint volumes in the context of the number of accounts, so we have included the number of complaints we received per 1,000 accounts for each of the six categories in the first column of each table (labelled ‘Provision’). Barclays Bank UK PLC has almost 36 million accounts and Barclays Bank PLC has over 1.2 million accounts within the Banking category. This includes all current and savings accounts, as well as credit cards.

In the last column of each table we have also highlighted the main cause of the complaints, as defined by the FCA, for each category. The majority of the complaints we received were classed as ‘general administration and customer service’, which includes areas such as delays and bank errors.