A sharp drop, but on a modest base
Between the prior 90-day window and the most recent one, the uphold rate for complaints about general financial advice fell from 45.6% to 27.4%, a decline of 18.2 percentage points. This happened while the number of decisions published in the category actually rose, from 91 in the earlier window to 104 in the latest one, an increase of 13 cases, or 14.3%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not being drawn from a handful of cases. But 91 and 104 decisions are still small numbers by the standards of the wider Financial Ombudsman corpus, and a move of this size deserves scrutiny rather than a headline.
General financial advice, as defined in this dataset, covers complaints that are not specifically about pension transfers or investment mis-selling: advisor conduct, ongoing advice fees, and the service quality of an independent financial adviser. Since the first case in this dataset was recorded on 8 April 2013, the Ombudsman has published 4,839 decisions in this category, of which 1,468 were upheld, 591 partially upheld and 2,780 not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate across the full run of data of 36.4%. That is comfortably above the uphold rate across all published Ombudsman decisions in Veste's corpus of 401,815 cases, which stands at 28.8%. Advice complaints, in other words, have historically succeeded somewhat more often than the average Ombudsman case, which makes the recent 90-day reading of 27.4% notable as a departure from the category's own long-run pattern, even if it sits close to the all-category baseline.
What the annual figures show
Looking at full calendar years smooths out some of the noise in short windows. In 2022, the category recorded 224 decisions with an uphold rate of 26.3%. That rose to 37.8% across 291 decisions in 2023, then climbed further to 43.9% across 271 decisions in 2024, the highest annual reading in this run of data. In 2025 the rate eased back to 36.5% on a larger sample of 293 decisions, and by 2026, with 184 decisions logged so far this year, it stands at 34.8%. Read against that backdrop, the year-to-date 2026 figure of 34.8% is itself below the 2024 peak but broadly in line with 2025 and 2023. It is the very latest 90-day slice, at 27.4%, that pulls further away from those annual averages, and that is a sign the recent movement may be concentrated in the most recent months rather than reflecting a shift that has been building steadily across 2026 as a whole.
The monthly picture: variation, not a straight line
Veste holds 25 months of monthly data for this category, running from June 2024 to June 2026. Volumes bounce around a lot from month to month, from as few as 12 decisions in June 2024 up to 63 in March 2026, and the uphold rate moves accordingly. December 2025 and January 2026 both saw comparatively high uphold rates, at 51.9% and 54.0% respectively, on 26 and 25 decisions. Since then, the reading has fallen in most months: February 2026 stood at 34.6% (26 decisions), March 2026 at 37.3% (63 decisions, the largest monthly total in the series), April 2026 at 22.2% (18 decisions), May 2026 at 25.0% (34 decisions), and June 2026, the most recent month in the series, at 30.6% (18 decisions).
That run of four lower months from March to June 2026 is consistent with the 90-day window comparison showing a fall, but it is worth noting that April's reading of 22.2% comes from only 18 decisions, a small enough sample that a handful of individual cases going one way or the other would move the percentage substantially. The monthly series as a whole shows a great deal of movement even across 2024 and 2025, with rates ranging from a low of 23.3% in May 2025 to a high of 64.3% in July 2024, itself based on only 14 decisions. Single-month uphold rates in this category, in short, have rarely been stable, and reading long-term significance into any one month, or even a short run of them, is not something the data supports on its own.
How individual firms compare
Among firms with enough published decisions in this category to meet Veste's minimum sample of 30, St. James's Place Wealth Management Plc has the largest count, with 169 decisions and an uphold rate of 32.0% (27 upheld, 54 partially upheld, 88 not upheld). Lloyds Bank PLC recorded 131 decisions at an uphold rate of 22.9%, and The Prudential Assurance Company Limited recorded 127 at 25.2%. Bank of Scotland Plc, a separately named entity in this dataset from its parent group, had 123 decisions at 27.2%, and Aviva Life & Pensions UK Limited had 120 at 20.8%, the lowest uphold rate among the ten firms with the largest published volumes in this category.
At the other end of the range, Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada (U.K.) Limited recorded the highest uphold rate among these firms, 57.5% across 100 decisions, notably higher than every other firm in the top ten. Santander UK Plc stood at 41.1% across 107 decisions and Legal & General Partnership Services Limited at 45.3% across 96. Barclays Bank Plc and Zurich Assurance Ltd sat in the middle of the group, at 33.3% (99 decisions) and 28.7% (87 decisions) respectively.
These figures are counted by the business name recorded on each published decision. Where a banking group operates through more than one regulated entity, such as Lloyds Bank PLC and Bank of Scotland Plc, those entities appear as separate rows in this dataset rather than being combined into a single group total. Readers comparing firms should bear that in mind, and none of these figures should be read as a ranking of overall customer service, only of the outcomes of the specific complaints that reached a published Ombudsman decision.
What individual decisions look like
Published decisions illustrate the range of issues that fall into this category, though a single case cannot establish a pattern on its own. In one decision dated 15 June 2026, the Ombudsman partially upheld a complaint against Quilter Financial Services Limited concerning a failure to provide an ongoing advice service. The complainant argued that annual reviews had been missed since 2016; the Ombudsman agreed that a review due in October 2020 had been missed and directed a refund of the associated year's charges plus investment growth, but found that a separate claim about an earlier, October 2018 review fell outside the Ombudsman's six-year jurisdiction limit, because the complainant ought reasonably to have understood the pattern of missed reviews well before bringing the complaint.
In a decision dated 11 June 2026 concerning Truly Independent LTD, the Ombudsman did not uphold a complaint after the firm declined to provide streamlined advice confirming that a client had received regulated advice, which would have allowed her to withdraw a pension worth over £30,000 with a guaranteed annuity rate. The Ombudsman found that firms are entitled to decline to act where full suitability analysis, which the complainant did not wish to pay for, would be required for advice on safeguarded pension benefits. These two decisions sit at opposite ends of the outcome spectrum and, taken together, underline that this category spans everything from straightforward service failures to firms exercising legitimate commercial judgement about which work they will take on.
What is driving the recent fall, and what remains uncertain
The data shows that the fall in the uphold rate coincided with a rise in decision volume, but rising volume and a falling uphold rate occurring together does not by itself explain why the rate moved. It could reflect a change in the mix of complaints reaching a decision, differences in the firms involved in the most recent batch of cases, or simply the kind of month-to-month variation already visible throughout the 25-month series, where uphold rates have swung between roughly a quarter and almost two-thirds of cases depending on the month. Nothing in the supplied data identifies a specific cause, and Veste has not sought to infer one.
Set against the wider set of related product categories, general financial advice's year-to-date 2026 uphold rate of 34.8% sits above several comparable categories, including pension complaints at 35.8% (which is very close), investment complaints at 32.9%, and mortgage complaints at 33.3%, while sitting below life and income protection cover at 38.0%. It remains far below PPI, which continues to show an uphold rate of 74.7% across 289 decisions, a legacy category with very different characteristics from advice complaints. None of these comparisons explain the recent fall in general financial advice, but they place it within the broader landscape of published outcomes across product types.
What the data does and does not tell us
The supplied evidence establishes that the uphold rate fell between two defined 90-day windows, that both windows contain enough decisions to meet Veste's sampling threshold, and that the category's own longer-run averages, both annual and across 25 months, show considerable variation over time. It does not establish that advice firms are behaving differently, that the Ombudsman has changed its approach to this category, or that any single firm's practices have shifted, because published decisions are not the same population as all complaints made to a firm, and the firms appearing most often in this category are not necessarily representative of the wider market for financial advice.
Conclusion
The headline movement, a fall of 18.2 percentage points in the uphold rate alongside rising case volume, is real in the sense that both figures come directly from published Ombudsman decisions. But set against a monthly series that has moved by comparable amounts many times over the past two years, and against annual figures that show the category's uphold rate easing gradually since a 2024 peak of 43.9%, the most recent 90-day reading looks more like the latest point in an already noisy series than the start of a clearly identified new trend. Anyone tracking this category closely would do better to watch the next two or three months of published decisions than to draw firm conclusions from the most recent quarter alone.