July to December 2017

For the second half of 2017, our results show that our Group complaint volumes excluding remediation (Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) and Packaged Bank Accounts (PBA)) reduced by 6% compared to the first half of 2017 and the day-to-day banking complaints have also reduced by 8%.

Our H2 2017 results show we are making strong progress in reducing the total number of complaints. Compared to H1 2017:

• Overall, we have seen a 3 percent fall in complaints
• Complaints excluding Payment Protection Insurance are down 6 percent
• Day-to-day banking complaints have reduced 8 percent
  

Bob Cliff, Head of Customer Experience, said: “Complaints are an important way for us to listen to our customers, learn where things are not working, and take action to put them right. We are pleased to see that total complaint volumes continue to reduce, and we will keep working hard to fix the things that cause our customers to complain in the first place.”

We meet a financial need for nearly 1 in 2 adults in the UK, so it makes sense to look at the numbers in the context of our size. For example, in the Banking and Credit cards category, we received 7 per cent fewer complaints per 1,000 accounts than in H1 2017.

We remain absolutely committed to delivering excellent customer experiences, and exceeding what our customers expect from their bank. In recent months, we have taken steps to:

Protect our customers against fraud and scams:

In October, Barclays became the first UK high street bank to introduce a fraud intervention service to its online banking system. Customers tricked into transferring money to a fraudster can now immediately get support to fix the situation with one simple phone call.

When a payment made online is flagged as suspicious and out of character, Barclays intervenes to ask the customer three questions to identify whether they are likely to have fallen victim to a fraudster. Questions might include: ‘Has someone just called you saying they are from your bank asking you to move money to a 'safe' account?’

The questions are designed to give customers a ‘stop and think’ moment to consider whether the request they have had to make a payment is genuine.

Ensure our customers can stay in control of their money:

Barclays became the first UK high street bank to launch payments using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, enabling customers to make payments using their voice.

The Siri integration means Barclays Mobile Banking customers don’t need to open the app to pay existing payees or mobile contacts, they can simply ask Siri things like “Pay John £15 with Barclays”. Payments are authenticated by the user with Apple’s TouchID fingerprint recognition, ensuring maximum security without the need to remember their passcode.

This technology enables customers to send money virtually hands free, and makes secure banking easier, faster and simpler for all customers, including those with additional needs.

Make it as easy as possible for business banking customer to manage their accounts:

In a banking industry first, Barclays collaborated with leading app providers to enable businesses to combine their banking data with the information provided by these apps into one dashboard within online banking.

Businesses can view their real-time banking data and information about their business side by side, brought to life in easy-to-access charts. For example, rather than accessing each app individually, a shop owner can now securely log in to their online banking and view not only their financial information, but bring in their product sales data, website analytics and staffing rotas, all alongside their cash flow.

Across London and the Home Counties, Barclays also launched a pilot to enhance the level of service that business banking customers receive in our branches. The pilot has been so successful in reducing complaint volumes that we will be rolling it out across the UK in Q2. For example, complaints logged about branch services in London have seen an 18 per cent reduction since the beginning of the pilot.

The data explained

The complaints tables below provide a breakdown of all complaints made to Barclays between July and December 2017.

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 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’). Across all of our legal entities we have almost 37 million accounts within the Banking category. This includes all current and savings accounts, as well as credit cards and loans. This number is high for Insurance and Pure Protection complaints, which is mainly driven due to the majority of complaints received for the policies sold in the past. A more comparative performance shows that we have received circa 42 complaints per 1000 accounts against our active 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 areas such as delays and bank errors.