July to December 2016

By applying the FCA’s new reporting principles to our last reporting period (H1 2016) our results show we are making strong progress in reducing the number of complaints:

• Overall, we have seen an 11% fall in complaints
• Complaints excluding Payment Protection Insurance are down 17%
• Day-to-day Banking complaints have reduced 21%

We have always treated every complaint with the utmost seriousness and while we are now reporting our complaints in a new format, we have not changed our approach. Our priority has always been to deliver excellent service every time a customer interacts with us. When we do make a mistake, we make every effort to try and rectify it as quickly as possible and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in the future.

Matt Hammerstein, Head of Client and Customer Experience at Barclays, said: “When someone complains, our first priority is to listen empathetically and even more importantly, to fix the issue as fast and effectively as we can. Our responsibility goes much deeper, though. We also focus on using what we learn from complaints to keep making our service better for all of our customers. We know we have more to do to reach our goal of delivering an excellent experience, every time.”

We meet a financial need for almost 1 in 2 UK adults and in the second half of 2016, we carried out over 10.1 million transactions on average per day – 120 every second. Across our 14.5m current account holders and 10m credit card customers, we want to provide our customers with an excellent experience in everything we do. This half, we have taken steps to:

• Ensure our customers can stay in control of their money:
  In December 2016, we introduced new features which enable our customers to instantly switch on and off remote purchases; and to amend their daily cash machine limit on BMB giving them more control and enabling them to feel more secure about their money.
  
  
• Protect our customers against fraud and scams:
  Last year, we prevented over £575m of fraud and continue to invest significantly in fraud prevention and awareness initiatives.
  
  In H2 2016, we piloted the Banking Protocol, which allows branch staff to request swift police help if they suspect a customer is victim to a fraud or scam. Through the pilot we prevented over £500,000 of our customers’ money falling into criminal hands, over half of the industry total.
  
  
• Make banking with us as convenient as possible:
  We’re constantly investing in the ways our customers can bank with us to give them the choice, speed and convenience they need – from our traditional in-branch services to 24/7 access to online, mobile, telephone and even video banking.
  
  In H2 2016, we launched the UK’s first contactless mobile cash service, offering customers a secure and easy way to withdraw money in-branch using their mobile phone. And, we made it possible for our business customers to secure instant SME loans through their Barclays mobile banking app.
  
  We also launched our new online direct investing service, providing Barclays customers with the first opportunity to view their investments, savings and current accounts in one place through a single log-in – making it easier for them to access more of their finances than ever before.
  
  
• Make Barclays the most accessible and inclusive organisation in the FTSE 100
  In 2016, we received the highest score (98%) ever awarded to an organisation by the Business Disability Forum for our commitments to meeting the needs of people with disabilities.
  
  As well as introducing high-visibility debit cards, which our customers can order free of charge to help making use their card easier, we’ve evolved our ATMs so they can provide speech output through audio jacks, allowing blind and partially sighted people to listen to the audio and use the machines independently. Our SignVideo service also allows deaf customers to get instant access to British Sign Language interpretation at home or in branch.
   

The Data Explained

The complaints tables below provide a breakdown of all complaints made to Barclays between July and December 2016.

The complaints data we have published below is split into each UK legal entity and is also shown in a Barclays Group summary, with segmentation across the six FCA product categories. Barclays Bank PLC is our main entity and accounts for the majority of all Barclays UK FCA reportable complaints (97%).  

The FCA also now requires 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’). Across all of our legal entities we have almost 44 million accounts within the Banking category. This includes all current and savings accounts, as well as credit cards and loans. General Insurance and Pure Protection complaints per ‘000 number is an outlier, which is mainly driven due to the majority of complaints received in H2 were for the PPI policies sold in the past. A more comparative performance shows that we have received c40 complaints per 1000 active PPI policies.

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 things like bank error and delays.