A rise that follows a much bigger fall
In the most recent 90-day window measured by Veste, 22.0% of published Financial Ombudsman decisions against firms classified as Financial adviser / IFA were upheld (including partial upholds weighted at half), up from 14.1% in the prior 90-day window. That is a rise of 7.9 percentage points. On the surface, it looks like a firm-type going through a rough patch for complaint handling. Look at the caseload underneath it, though, and the more accurate description is a small rebound from an unusually low point, not evidence of a new trend.
The current window covered 230 decisions, down from 316 in the prior window, a fall of 86 decisions, or 27.2%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not being drawn from a handful of cases. But a 7.9 point movement on a base uphold rate of 14.1% is still a large proportional swing, and it is happening against a backdrop of a rate that has been falling for years, not rising.
The scale of the numbers
Across the full published history Veste holds for this firm-type, from 3 April 2013 to 2 June 2026, there have been 12,525 decisions, of which 5,328 were fully upheld, 982 partially upheld and 6,215 not upheld. That produces an all-time uphold rate of 46.5% for Financial adviser / IFA decisions, using the (upheld + 0.5 × partially upheld) / total definition Veste applies throughout. For comparison, the uphold rate across the entire corpus of 400,462 Financial Ombudsman decisions Veste has analysed, spanning all firm types, is 28.8%. Financial advisers and IFAs have historically been upheld against more often than the market as a whole, though the current 90-day rate of 22.0% sits below both that long-run average and the corpus-wide baseline.
What the yearly figures show
The year-on-year series makes the direction of travel clearer than the 90-day comparison alone. In 2022, 974 decisions were recorded with a 47.7% uphold rate. In 2023, that rose to 1,210 decisions at 52.6%. From there the rate has fallen every year: 731 decisions in 2024 at 44.0%, 543 decisions in 2025 at 36.3%, and so far in 2026, 492 decisions at just 17.2%. All five years meet Veste's minimum sample size for firm-type comparisons.
Set against that decline, a 7.9 point uptick between two recent 90-day windows looks less like the start of a recovery and more like ordinary short-term variation inside a rate that has already fallen a long way. The 2026 year-to-date rate of 17.2% remains far below the 2023 peak of 52.6% and below every other year in the series.
The monthly picture is choppier still
Veste's monthly series runs for 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. It shows uphold rates bouncing between roughly 0.3 and 0.47 through most of 2024 and into mid-2025, before falling sharply from December 2025 onwards. December 2025 recorded a 21.5% uphold rate on 65 decisions. January 2026 fell further to 15.6% on 109 decisions, and February 2026 to 9.6% on 130 decisions, the lowest monthly rate in the series. March 2026 ticked up slightly to 18.6% on a much larger 180 decisions. April and May 2026 then rose again, to 33.3% on 30 decisions and 25.0% on 38 decisions respectively, before the partial month of June 2026 showed 40.0% on just 5 decisions.
That pattern of low points in January and February 2026 followed by a partial recovery in April and May is almost certainly the mechanical driver of the 7.9 point rise Veste's 90-day comparison captures: the prior window will have overlapped with the January-to-March trough, while the current window catches more of the April-May recovery. This is a description of what the monthly figures show, not a claim about why the Ombudsman's decision-making changed, which the data does not explain.
Falling volume alongside a lower rate
The 27.2% drop in decision volume between the two 90-day windows is worth treating as a separate fact from the uphold-rate movement, even though they occurred together. Fewer decisions were published in the current window than in the prior one. Whether that reflects fewer complaints referred to the Ombudsman, a backlog effect, or simply the timing of when decisions get published is not something the supplied data can answer. What can be said is that the current window's uphold rate of 22.0% is calculated on a smaller pool of decisions than the 14.1% recorded in the prior window, which is one reason percentage-point movements of this size are more easily produced when a sector's caseload has thinned out.
How individual firms compare
Veste's firm-level data, which counts decisions under the exact business name recorded in each Ombudsman decision rather than rolling subsidiaries up into parent banking or advisory groups, shows wide variation across the ten firms with the largest published caseloads in this category. Portal Financial Services LLP recorded the highest uphold rate among them, at 92.9% across 218 decisions (200 upheld, 5 partial, 13 not upheld). The Mortgage Matters Partnership followed at 76.8% across 250 decisions. TenetConnect Limited stood at 63.3% across 154 decisions, and Lighthouse Advisory Services Limited at 61.8% across 144 decisions.
At the other end, Clydesdale Financial Services Limited, the firm with the largest volume in this list at 1,925 decisions, recorded a 17.3% uphold rate, with 269 decisions upheld, 129 partially upheld and 1,527 not upheld. Sesame Limited, with 474 decisions, sat at 42.7%. Openwork Limited (332 decisions) recorded 30.4%, Countrywide Principal Services Limited (264 decisions) 30.7%, Countrywide Assured Plc (196 decisions) 30.9%, and Personal Touch Financial Services Ltd (148 decisions) 31.8%.
This spread illustrates why an aggregate figure for a firm-type as broad as Financial adviser / IFA can obscure more than it reveals. A category that includes a firm upheld in 92.9% of its published decisions and another upheld in 17.3% of its published decisions is not describing one uniform standard of advice. It is worth repeating that these figures cover published Ombudsman decisions only, not the total number of complaints each firm received, and that a subsidiary trading under its own name is counted separately from any parent group.
What the underlying decisions look like
Veste's dataset includes individual decisions dated 2 June 2026 that illustrate the range of issues within this firm-type, without establishing a pattern beyond the cases themselves. In one, Stephen Devey trading as Abraxas Financial Consultants had a complaint upheld concerning the choice of an offshore investment bond as a tax wrapper for two clients who invested £500,000 in January 2010 and a further £260,000 in October 2011; the Ombudsman found the underlying investment strategy suitable but the documentation of alternative tax-efficient options inadequate. In another, Personal Touch Financial Services Limited, trading as PRIMIS Mortgage Network, had a complaint upheld after an adviser incorrectly told clients that historic property movement would not affect their buildings insurance, leading to a declined claim; the firm was ordered to arrange a loss adjuster assessment and pay £1,000 compensation.
Two decisions from the same date were not upheld. Clarke Fencott LLP's advice to transfer a defined benefit pension with a cash equivalent transfer value of £451,382.93 was found suitable despite the recommended portfolio being unlikely to match the 10.43% to 13.91% critical yield needed to replicate the scheme's benefits, because the client had a genuine need for tax-free cash to purchase a property. Connect IFA Ltd, trading as Connect Mortgages, was found to have properly disclosed and reasonably charged a 1% broker fee even though the underlying mortgage did not complete.
These four cases are presented as examples of the range of subject matter reaching the Ombudsman in this category, not as a representative sample of outcomes across the 230 decisions in the current window.
What the data does not show
Veste's figures describe published Ombudsman decisions, which is a narrower population than all complaints made to firms in this category; many complaints are resolved or withdrawn before reaching a published decision, and the data cannot speak to those. The 7.9 point rise between the two most recent 90-day windows is a genuine feature of the published record, but it sits inside a longer decline from 52.6% in 2023 to 17.2% so far in 2026, and the monthly series shows the rate has moved by double-digit percentage points from one month to the next several times in the past two years. Reading a two-window comparison as a turning point, on this evidence, would be premature.
The practical takeaway
For anyone tracking this sector, the more durable signal in Veste's data is the multi-year decline in the uphold rate for Financial adviser / IFA decisions, from 52.6% in 2023 to 17.2% in the year to date, rather than the 7.9 point rise between two recent quarters. The short-term rise looks consistent with a rebound from the exceptionally low rates recorded in January and February 2026, on a caseload that has itself shrunk by 27.2%. Firm-level variation, from Portal Financial Services LLP's 92.9% to Clydesdale Financial Services Limited's 17.3%, matters more for anyone assessing a specific business than the category-wide average does.