A falling uphold rate against a rising caseload
In the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, Financial Ombudsman Service decisions against investment platforms and wealth managers carried an uphold rate of 31%, down from 35.2% in the prior 90-day window. That is a fall of 4.2 percentage points. Over the same comparison, the number of published decisions rose from 236 to 372, an increase of 136 decisions, or 57.6%.
Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not resting on a handful of cases. But a movement of 4.2 percentage points on a base uphold rate in the low-to-mid thirties is modest by the standards of the sector's own recent history, and the monthly series below shows why some caution is warranted before treating it as a turning point.
The numbers in context
Across the full period Veste holds data for this firm-type category, from 3 April 2013 to 13 May 2026, 10,954 decisions have been published. Of these, 3,831 were upheld, 1,130 were partially upheld and 5,993 were not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 40.1% across the whole historical run. That is above the wider Financial Ombudsman corpus uphold rate of 28.9% across all 398,617 decisions Veste has recorded, indicating that investment and wealth complaints have historically been upheld somewhat more often than the average across all complaint types, though the two figures cover different time spans and are not a like-for-like comparison.
The year-on-year figures show a category that has been cooling for several years. In 2023, 1,529 decisions were recorded with an uphold rate of 57.1%. That fell to 45.8% across 1,106 decisions in 2022, then to 41.6% across 1,185 decisions in 2024, and to 39.9% across 1,070 decisions in 2025. The partial-year figure for 2026 so far stands at 32.4% across 486 decisions. Each of these annual figures meets Veste's minimum sample size, so the year-on-year decline from 57.1% in 2023 to 32.4% in the opening months of 2026 describes a genuine multi-year pattern rather than a single anomalous window.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly trend data runs across 25 months, from May 2024 to May 2026. Within that run, monthly uphold rates have bounced between a low of 26.4% (May 2026, on a smaller total of 36 decisions) and a high of 60.8% (June 2025, on 111 decisions). Rates below 30% appeared repeatedly during the period: July 2024 (29.2%), September 2025 (29.4%), December 2025 (29.5%), March 2026 (28.9%) and April 2026 (28.8%), alongside the May 2026 figure of 26.4%.
This matters for how the latest 90-day fall should be read. The category's monthly uphold rate has already spent several months below 30% more than once in the past two years, including a run through late 2025 and into early 2026. The most recent 90-day figure of 31% sits inside a range the series has visited repeatedly rather than marking a new low. March 2026 alone saw 192 decisions, the highest monthly total in the 25-month series, with an uphold rate of 28.9%, so much of the volume increase behind the period-on-period comparison appears concentrated in a small number of unusually busy months rather than a steady month-on-month climb.
Firm mix: wide variation beneath the category figure
The category-level rate is an average across firms whose individual uphold rates vary enormously, and Veste's firm grouping counts businesses by the exact name recorded on each decision, so subsidiaries of the same banking group are not combined.
Among the ten firms with the largest published decision counts in this category, Options UK Personal Pensions LLP stands out with 470 decisions and an uphold rate of 99.7%, all but two of which were upheld or partially upheld. At the other end, IG Index Limited recorded an uphold rate of 9.9% across 162 decisions, and Trading 212 UK Limited recorded 12.3% across 179 decisions. St. James's Place Wealth Management Plc, the largest firm by volume in this list with 671 decisions, had an uphold rate of 26.2%, comprising 117 upheld, 118 partially upheld and 436 not upheld decisions. Hargreaves Lansdown Asset Management Limited recorded 583 decisions with an uphold rate of 17%. AWP P&C SA recorded 431 decisions at 55.7%, Halifax Share Dealing Limited 329 decisions at 37.2%, Interactive Investor Services Limited 257 decisions at 26.8%, Active Securities Limited 217 decisions at 56%, and IG Markets Limited 141 decisions at 19.1%.
This spread illustrates why a category-wide movement of a few percentage points should not be read as a comment on any single firm's conduct. A shift in the proportion of decisions coming from, say, a high-uphold-rate firm versus a low-uphold-rate firm in a given 90-day window can move the blended category figure without any individual firm's own pattern changing at all. Veste's data does not break down which firms contributed which share of the current versus prior 90-day windows, so it is not possible to say from this evidence how much of the 4.2 percentage point fall is attributable to firm mix rather than to a genuine change in decision outcomes.
What may be driving the pattern, and what is interpretation
The observed facts are these: the uphold rate fell by 4.2 percentage points between two 90-day windows that both meet the minimum sample threshold, decision volume rose by 57.6% over the same comparison, and the monthly series shows the rate has repeatedly dipped into the high-twenties to low-thirties range over the past two years, including in months preceding the latest window.
What cannot be established from this data is why. Veste's dataset does not identify the specific drivers of any change in outcome rate, whether that be shifts in the mix of complaint types reaching the Ombudsman, changes in how firms respond to complaints before they reach a final decision, or simply variation in which cases happen to be published in a given quarter. The related complaint-category figures give some texture: pension transfer advice complaints across the wider corpus carry a notably high uphold rate of 66.9% across 1,527 decisions, while account closure complaints sit at 14.9% across 282 decisions and other regulated complaints at 18.1% across 387 decisions. If the mix of complaint types within the investment and wealth category shifted between the two 90-day windows, that alone could move the blended rate, but Veste's evidence does not show that breakdown for this specific comparison, so this remains a plausible contributing factor rather than a demonstrated one.
Individual decisions as illustration
Four decisions published on 13 May 2026 illustrate the range of issues reaching the Ombudsman in this category, though they are presented here as examples of case types rather than evidence of a broader trend.
In one case, a complaint against Vanguard Asset Management Limited concerning an ISA from which approximately £45,000 had been withdrawn over roughly eighteen months was not upheld. The Ombudsman found that the execution-only nature of the account limited the firm's obligations, and that the customer had not disclosed the vulnerability he later cited.
A complaint against Flagstone Group LTD, trading as Flagstone, concerning delays of around four months in setting up a self-invested personal pension and a further two months resolving account naming issues, was upheld. The Ombudsman found the firm had caused avoidable delays and ordered a loss assessment plus the £400 compensation the firm had already offered, with 8% interest from the decision date.
A complaint against Webull Securities (UK) Ltd, in which a customer alleged the platform failed to protect him from a market manipulation scheme run through a messaging group, was not upheld, the Ombudsman finding the execution-only service model did not require the firm to monitor or warn about activity occurring outside its visibility.
A complaint against St. James's Place Wealth Management Plc, disputing a 4.5% initial advice charge applied to investment bonds within a £2,000,000 investment, was not upheld after the Ombudsman found the product illustrations had clearly disclosed the charge structure.
These four cases show the diversity of issues within a single firm-type category, from administrative delay to disputed disclosure to the limits of an execution-only relationship, and none of them should be read as representative of how any firm handles complaints generally.
The longer view and what the data does not tell us
Taken together, the annual figures show a category-wide uphold rate that has declined fairly steadily since 2023, from 57.1% down to 32.4% in the year to date. The latest 90-day fall of 4.2 percentage points sits within that longer downward drift rather than representing a sudden departure from it. At the same time, the monthly series shows enough month-to-month volatility, swinging between roughly 26% and 61% over 25 months, that any single quarter's movement needs to be read against that backdrop rather than in isolation.
What this data cannot tell us is whether firms' underlying complaint-handling behaviour has changed, whether the mix of complaint types has shifted, or whether the increase in published decision volume reflects more complaints being referred to the Ombudsman or simply more decisions being published in this period. Published Ombudsman decisions are also not the same population as all complaints made to firms; many complaints are resolved or withdrawn before reaching a final decision, and those are not captured here.
Conclusion
The practical implication for anyone tracking this sector is that a single quarter's uphold rate movement of a few percentage points, even on a reasonably sized sample, sits comfortably within the range this category has shown over the past two years. The more durable signal in Veste's data is the year-on-year decline from 2023's 57.1% to the 32.4% recorded so far in 2026, alongside the wide and persistent variation in uphold rates between individual firms within the same category, from under 10% to close to 100%. Anyone assessing risk or performance in this space should weigh firm-level figures over category averages, and treat short-window movements as one data point within a noisier longer series rather than a verdict in themselves.