A rate rise built on a shrinking base
In the most recent 90-day window measured by Veste, the uphold rate for decisions against financial advisers and IFAs stood at 23.5%, up from 15.1% in the prior 90-day window, a rise of 8.4 percentage points. Over the same comparison, the number of published decisions fell sharply: from 357 in the prior window to 181 in the latest one, a drop of 176 decisions, or 49.3%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not disqualified on sample-size grounds alone. But a rate moving on a base that has nearly halved deserves scrutiny before it is treated as a meaningful signal about how advisers are being assessed.
The uphold rate used throughout this analysis follows Veste's standard definition: (upheld decisions + 0.5 × partially upheld decisions) ÷ total decisions. This gives partially upheld outcomes half weight, reflecting that they represent a mixed result rather than a full win for either side.
The numbers in context
Across the full published record, Financial adviser / IFA decisions total 12,544, of which 5,330 were upheld, 984 partially upheld and 6,230 not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 46.4% since the earliest decision on 3 April 2013 through to the most recent on 15 June 2026. That headline figure sits well above the baseline uphold rate across the entire Veste corpus of 401,815 published decisions, which stands at 28.8%. Financial advisers, as a category, have historically been upheld more often than the average firm across all sectors Veste tracks.
That makes the recent 90-day figures of 15.1% and 23.5% look low by the category's own long-run standard, even after the increase. The current 23.5% remains well below the 46.4% all-time rate for the category and below the corpus-wide baseline of 28.8% too.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly trend runs for 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. It shows the uphold rate has not moved in a straight line. In June 2024 it stood at 32.9% on 35 decisions. It rose as high as 47.4% in October 2024 (39 decisions) and fell to a low of 9.6% in February 2026, on a much larger 130 decisions. March 2026 saw the highest monthly volume in the series, 180 decisions, with an uphold rate of 18.6%.
The most recent three months in the series, April, May and June 2026, recorded uphold rates of 33.3% (30 decisions), 25.0% (38 decisions) and 20.8% (24 decisions) respectively. None of these approaches the October 2024 peak, and June 2026's volume of 24 decisions is among the smallest in the whole 25-month run. The picture that emerges from the monthly data is one of a category that has been on a downward trend in uphold rate since late 2024 and into early 2026, with volume spiking sharply in January, February and March 2026 (109, 130 and 180 decisions respectively) before falling back to much lower monthly counts from April onward.
This matters for interpreting the 90-day comparison. The prior 90-day window likely captures some of the high-volume, low-uphold-rate months around the start of 2026, while the current window falls into the lower-volume months that follow. An increase in the uphold rate alongside a sharp drop in volume is consistent with the pattern already visible in the monthly series, where the largest volume months (January to March 2026) also carried some of the lowest uphold rates in the entire 25-month period. When volume drops back to more typical levels, as it did from April, the uphold rate has moved back up towards figures last seen in mid-2025.
The annual picture
Year-on-year figures reinforce that the category's uphold rate has been falling for several years, independent of the recent quarterly volatility. In 2022, financial advisers had 974 decisions at a 47.7% uphold rate. In 2023, the volume rose to 1,210 decisions and the uphold rate rose slightly to 52.6%, the highest of the five years shown. From there the rate fell: 2024 recorded 731 decisions at 44.0%, 2025 recorded 543 decisions at 36.3%, and the partial year 2026 recorded 511 decisions at 17.1%, the lowest uphold rate of the period, on the second-highest volume of the five years. This multi-year decline gives the recent 90-day uptick some context. It looks less like a reversal of a longer trend and more like a small bounce within a series that has, over several years, moved firmly downward in uphold-rate terms.
Firm mix: wide variation beneath the category average
Veste's dataset includes ten firms in the financial adviser category that meet the minimum sample of 30 decisions, and the range between them is wide. Clydesdale Financial Services Limited recorded the highest volume, 1,925 decisions, with an uphold rate of 17.3%, close to the recent 90-day figures for the category as a whole. At the other end, Portal Financial Services LLP recorded 218 decisions with a 92.9% uphold rate, and The Mortgage Matters Partnership recorded 250 decisions at 76.8%. Sesame Limited (474 decisions, 42.7%), Openwork Limited (333 decisions, 30.3%), Countrywide Principal Services Limited (264 decisions, 30.7%), Countrywide Assured Plc (196 decisions, 30.9%), TenetConnect Limited (154 decisions, 63.3%), Personal Touch Financial Services Ltd (148 decisions, 31.8%) and Lighthouse Advisory Services Limited (144 decisions, 61.8%) fill out the remainder of the list, each recorded under its own business name. Veste counts firms by the exact business name on each decision, so related entities within the same corporate or network group appear as separate rows and are not combined, even where they may share ownership or advisory networks.
This spread illustrates why category-level movements should not be read as a statement about any individual firm. Clydesdale's high volume and comparatively low uphold rate pulls the category average down, while much smaller firms with very different outcomes, such as Portal Financial Services LLP, sit at the opposite extreme. A shift in the overall category rate could, in principle, reflect changes in the mix of decisions published for large-volume firms like Clydesdale as much as any change in how advice complaints generally are being assessed.
Related complaint categories
Among claim types Veste tracks that overlap with financial adviser activity, pension transfer advice complaints show a 68.3% uphold rate across 2,718 decisions, and investment mis-selling shows 59.6% across 2,515 decisions, both considerably higher than the recent 90-day rate for the adviser category overall. Mortgage advice complaints, by contrast, show a 23.8% uphold rate across 845 decisions, closer to the current 90-day figure. General financial advice complaints show 44.6% across 936 decisions. These figures describe claim types rather than firms, and they cannot be mapped directly onto the firm-level or period comparisons above, but they indicate that uphold rates vary substantially by the nature of the complaint as well as by firm.
Individual decisions as illustration
Four decisions published on or around 15 June 2026 give a sense of the kind of cases that make up the category, though none should be read as representative of a trend. In one case (DRN-6428320), the ombudsman did not uphold a complaint against Quilter Mortgage Planning Limited concerning income protection insurance, finding the policies were suitable and that a later interruption to benefit payments arose from the complainant's own decision to take pension income earlier than his stated intended retirement age, a circumstance not foreseeable at the time of sale. In another (DRN-6309068), a complaint against Quilter Financial Services Limited over a missed annual review was partially upheld, with the ombudsman ordering a refund of charges plus growth for a review missed in October 2020, but rejecting the element of the claim relating to October 2018 as outside the six-year jurisdiction limit. A complaint against HL Partnership Limited over advice on a £1,600,000 bridging loan (DRN-6340655) was not upheld, the ombudsman finding the advice suitable given the complainant's circumstances despite inaccuracies in the suitability letter. A complaint against Quilter Financial Limited over pension transfer advice (DRN-6298755) was also not upheld, the ombudsman finding the client had sufficient other guaranteed pension income to meet retirement needs despite losing a valuable guaranteed minimum pension entitlement. These four examples span not-upheld, partially upheld and not-upheld outcomes, and illustrate the range of reasoning ombudsmen apply to adviser complaints rather than any single pattern.
What the data does and does not show
The supplied data demonstrates that the uphold rate for financial adviser decisions rose between two 90-day windows while volume fell sharply, and that this sits within a longer-run decline in the category's annual uphold rate since 2023. It does not demonstrate that advice quality has improved, that the Ombudsman has changed its approach to these cases, or that any named firm's practices have changed. Published Ombudsman decisions are also not the same population as all complaints made to firms in this category: many complaints are resolved before reaching a published decision, and the mix of cases that do reach publication can shift for reasons unrelated to underlying advice standards, including which complaints firms choose to contest and how quickly cases move through the system.
Conclusion
The 8.4 percentage point rise in the financial adviser uphold rate, from 15.1% to 23.5%, is a real feature of the supplied 90-day comparison, but it follows a period, January to March 2026, in which decision volumes for this category were unusually high and uphold rates unusually low by the standards of the 25-month monthly series. Readers using this category to assess adviser risk should look at the multi-year trend, where the uphold rate has fallen from 52.6% in 2023 to 17.1% so far in 2026, and at firm-level figures for named businesses that meet the minimum sample, rather than relying on a single quarter-on-quarter movement on a much smaller base of decisions.