July to December 2020

Our H2 2020 results continue to show significant reductions in complaints volumes across Barclays UK year-on-year, largely due to coronavirus causing decreased customer activity.

• Excluding Payment Protection Insurance, we have seen an overall reduction in BUK complaints year-on-year (36%) but a slight increase half-on-half (2%).
• We have seen the drop in BUK banking complaints versus 2019 continue (down 2% on H1-20 and 43% on H2-19). This is largely due to decreased customer spending and transactions.
• We have seen a 32% decline in complaints for investments versus the second half of 2019.

Samantha White, Barclays UK Head of Virtual Channels, said: “During this difficult time, we understand that our customers expect their bank to provide a flawless service, which is why we strive to provide a great experience no matter the channel they choose to interact with us through, be it branch, by phone or via our mobile app or online banking.

“It’s encouraging to see complaints reduce again year-on-year, however we will continue to work tirelessly to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers”

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 43% fewer complaints per 1,000 accounts than in H2 2019.

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:

Continue to support our customers and clients through coronavirus

Our number one priority is our customers and continuing to support them throughout this period. We have provided over 680,000 payment holidays to our customers, waived over £100m of fees and interest charges and granted hundreds of thousands of payment holidays, to help them through this difficult time.

We continue to support an estimated one million SME customers across the UK through the ongoing challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, helping UK businesses with the Bounce Back Loan (BBL) and Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan (CBIL) schemes, facilitating over £11 billion worth of funding. Our wider financial support measures, such as free everyday banking and overdrafts, also provided a critical supporting hand to SMEs with a turnover of under £250k throughout 2020.

In addition to lending, to make things easier for our customers, our other partnerships such as Propel, MarketFinance, Nimbla and Smart Pension provide businesses with even more flexibility and choice to best suit their financial needs through innovative asset finance, invoice finance, invoice insurance and employee pension solutions respectively.

Protect our customers against fraud and scams

We’re committed to protecting our customers and colleagues and ensuring that we provide as much education and awareness as we can, across social media, email and app notifications, to help safeguard them against fraud and scams. We have also increased our colleague awareness and training to help our colleagues better protect customers. The training is intended to upskill and help colleagues spot scams, as well as have the right conversations with customers and is delivered across multiple platforms including face-to-face, video and over the phone.

In September 2020, we introduced Payment Purpose into our branch and telephony channels. Payment Purpose asks customers to select from one of nine ‘payment purpose’ options for the reason they’re making the payment. We then present them with a tailored scams warning message suitable for that type of scam including actions we would like the customer to carry out.

Additionally, we are part of the ‘Do not originate’ scheme, created in partnership with the telecommunications industry, UK Finance and Ofcom, to prevent our most common inbound helpline phone numbers from being used in a scam. Participating telephone companies are provided with phone numbers that we use only for inbound customer calls and never for outbound. These numbers are then blocked should the telephone companies see them being spoofed by fraudsters. We are passionate about protecting our customers from fraudsters, so when the opportunity to contribute to this scheme came up we were keen to take part.

Help customers stay in control of their finances

We’re always working to build better ways to help our customers manage their money. In September we launched Barclays Savings Goals in the Barclays app, which helps work out how much is needed to save each day, week or month, in order to hit a target, and offers a personalised tracker to help people monitor their progress and keep on top of their goal.

We also launched Money Workouts, a free pilot allowing people to try out six different savings challenges to help shape up their finances.

For those looking to invest their savings, we launched Plan & Invest, a new digital advice service to tackle the UK’s advice gap and give more people the confidence and support to invest their savings. The service creates a personalised investment plan that is tailored to a customer’s goals, with Barclays then managing the investments on their behalf – traditionally known as discretionary portfolio management.