Uphold rate falls as case volume climbs
In the most recent 90-day window measured by Veste, Financial Ombudsman decisions involving credit card specialist firms carried an uphold rate of 12.6%, down 4.6 percentage points from 17.2% in the prior 90-day window. That fall in the uphold rate came alongside a rise in the number of decisions published: 607 in the current window against 410 in the prior one, an increase of 197 decisions, or 48.0%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not resting on a handful of cases. But a falling uphold rate on rising volume is not automatically a sign that firms are behaving better or worse. It is, at minimum, worth setting against the longer run of data before drawing any conclusion.
The numbers in context
Across the full monthly series Veste holds for this category, 25 months from May 2024 to May 2026, the uphold rate has moved in a broadly downward direction. In May 2024 it stood at 38.3%. By March 2026 it had fallen to 12.1%, and in the most recent, still-incomplete month of May 2026 it registered 9.1% on 77 decisions, a caveat given the size and lower month, which typically reflects a still-accumulating publication window. The trajectory is not a straight line: there were bumps upward in September and October 2024, when the rate reached 42.7% and 42.4% respectively, before falling back through the winter of 2024-25 and continuing lower through 2025 into 2026.
The year-on-year figures reinforce the pattern rather than contradicting it. In 2022, the uphold rate across the category stood at 39.9% on 1,156 decisions. In 2023 it was 32.1% on 915 decisions. In 2024 it was 33.1% on 1,316 decisions, essentially flat against 2023. In 2025 it fell more sharply to 20.2% on 1,624 decisions, and so far in 2026 it stands at 13.2% on 834 decisions. Each of these annual figures meets Veste's minimum sample size. Taken together, they describe a category-wide decline that has been running for roughly two to three years, not a sudden feature of the latest quarter alone.
For comparison, the uphold rate across Veste's entire corpus of 398,922 decisions with an outcome stands at 28.9%. The credit card specialist category's current 90-day rate of 12.6% sits well below that corpus-wide baseline, and its full-history rate across all 20,725 decisions recorded for the category, spanning from April 2013 to May 2026, is 34.0%, which itself sits above the corpus baseline. In other words, the category has historically run somewhat hotter than the average Ombudsman book, and the recent fall represents a marked departure from that historical pattern, at least on the measure Veste uses here.
How uphold rate is defined
Veste calculates the uphold rate as the number of fully upheld decisions plus half of partially upheld decisions, divided by the total number of decisions, consistent across every figure in this article. Across the category's full history, of 20,725 decisions, 5,475 were fully upheld, 3,125 were partially upheld and 12,125 were not upheld.
Firm mix within the category
Credit card specialist is not a single firm but a group of businesses that Veste tracks under one heading, and it is worth being precise about how the constituent firms compare, because volume is concentrated unevenly. Ten firms in this category meet Veste's minimum sample size for individual comparison. Capital One (Europe) plc accounts for 6,705 decisions in the full history, with an uphold rate of 35.9%. MBNA Limited has 3,857 decisions at 27.7%. NewDay Ltd has 2,599 decisions at 37.4%. Vanquis Bank Limited has 1,434 decisions at 19.8%. American Express Services Europe Limited has 1,291 decisions at 21.8%, while a separately recorded entity, American Express Services Europe Limited (AESEL), has 596 decisions at 24.9%; Veste's data groups firms by the exact business name recorded on each decision, so these are not merged even though they may relate to the same wider corporate structure, and the same caution applies to any subsidiary of a larger banking group appearing under its own name.
Creation Consumer Finance Ltd, with 1,178 decisions, has the highest uphold rate among the larger firms in the category at 61.8%, and a related entity, Creation Financial Services Limited, with 366 decisions, has a rate of 47.5%. Shop Direct Finance Company Limited has 1,061 decisions at 23.6%. WDFC UK Limited, with 739 decisions, has the highest uphold rate of any firm listed at 68.3%.
This spread matters for interpreting the category-level fall. A category-wide uphold rate is a blend of whichever firms are contributing decisions in a given period. If the mix of firms publishing decisions shifts, for example if a firm with a historically lower uphold rate accounts for a larger share of a given window's volume, the blended rate can move even if no individual firm's behaviour has changed. Veste's supplied data does not include a breakdown of firm-level volume specifically within the current 90-day window, so this article cannot state which firms drove the latest fall; it can only note that firm mix is a plausible contributing factor sitting alongside a rate that has already been declining for an extended period at the category level.
What appears to be driving the trend, and what is interpretation
The monthly series shows the uphold rate falling in a fairly persistent way from the second half of 2024 onwards, through most of 2025 and into 2026, rather than in a single step change tied to the latest quarter. That longer pattern is consistent with the category-level year-on-year figures, which show the rate falling from 33.1% in 2024 to 20.2% in 2025 to 13.2% so far in 2026. The latest 90-day figure of 12.6% is broadly in line with, rather than a sharp break from, the trajectory already visible across 2025 and early 2026.
What the supplied data cannot establish is why the rate has fallen. It could reflect firms improving affordability checks and complaint handling, changes in the type or seriousness of complaints being referred, changes in Ombudsman decision-making practice, or simply a shift in the mix of firms and issue types contributing to published decisions. Veste's data does not contain information that would let us distinguish between these explanations, and readers should treat any single explanation offered elsewhere with caution.
Individual decisions as illustration
Four decisions dated 15 May 2026 are included in Veste's supplied examples for this category, and all four were not upheld. One involved a complaint against NewDay Ltd, trading as Aqua and Fluid, over irresponsible lending relating to credit card limit increases between 2017 and 2018; the Ombudsman found the firm's initial checks proportionate, though it noted NewDay had already provided compensation for a limit increase in July 2022 that it accepted it should not have made. A second involved Creation Consumer Finance Limited and a £20,100 loan taken out in November 2025, where the Ombudsman found the firm's checks proportionate for a first loan and did not uphold the complaint, while reminding the firm of its forbearance obligations. A third concerned MBNA Limited and a complaint about handling of payments linked to compulsive gambling spending, which the Ombudsman did not uphold on the basis that intervention was unlikely to have prevented the payments and further chargebacks were unlikely to succeed under scheme rules. A fourth involved Clydesdale Financial Services Limited trading as Barclays Partner Finance, concerning a credit agreement for a 2010 timeshare purchase, where the complaint was found time-barred and unsupported on its other grounds.
These four cases are illustrative only. They do not represent a statistical sample of the category and should not be read as evidence of a trend on their own; they are included here because they are the specific decisions supplied for this date, not because they are typical or atypical of the wider pattern described above.
Related issue types
Among the issue categories Veste tracks that overlap with credit card complaints, PPI mis-selling carries an uphold rate of 39.6% across 8,065 decisions, irresponsible lending 34.5% across 3,587 decisions, and goods and services claims under Section 75 38.2% across 1,783 decisions. Card and payment disputes specifically carry a lower uphold rate of 18.8% across 1,105 decisions, closer to the current credit card specialist category rate than the broader lending-related categories. Account administration errors sit at 23.8% across 1,312 decisions and credit file or adverse marker disputes at 25.8% across 1,300 decisions.
What the data does and does not show
Veste's figures show that published Ombudsman decisions for credit card specialist firms have carried a lower uphold rate over the past two to three years than in 2022, and that the most recent 90-day comparison continues that direction of travel with a fall of 4.6 percentage points against a rising decision volume. Both comparison windows meet the minimum sample threshold, so this is not solely a small-sample artefact, though a single 90-day movement still sits within a series that has shown some month-to-month variation, including a spike to 42.7% in September 2024.
What the data does not show is the cause of the decline, the specific firm mix behind the latest quarter's figure, or whether the pattern will continue. It also does not describe the population of all complaints made to these firms, only those that reached a published Ombudsman decision, a smaller and different population from the total complaints received.
The practical implication
For anyone tracking this category, the useful takeaway is less the single quarter-on-quarter figure and more the sustained direction: the uphold rate for credit card specialist decisions has fallen in each of the last several years, from 39.9% in 2022 to 13.2% so far in 2026, against a backdrop of a corpus-wide baseline of 28.9%. The latest 90-day movement fits that longer pattern rather than standing apart from it, which is itself the more informative finding than the quarterly change taken in isolation.