A ten-point fall, but not a sudden one
Over the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, the Financial Ombudsman upheld or partially upheld 26.4% of published decisions against firms in the Motor finance specialist category, down from 36.4% in the preceding 90-day window. That is a fall of 10.0 percentage points. It has happened alongside a rise in the number of decisions published, from 681 in the prior window to 794 in the latest one, an increase of 113 cases, or 16.6%. Both windows comfortably clear Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so this is not a case of a handful of outcomes swinging a tiny sample.
The category covers firms whose primary business is vehicle finance, including Motonovo, Black Horse, Blue Motor Finance, Startline, Advantage Finance, Marsh Finance and Close Brothers Motor Finance, as they appear in the underlying decision data.
The numbers behind the movement
Across the full run of data Veste holds for this category, from the first published decision on 4 April 2013 to the most recent on 15 May 2026, there have been 17,429 decisions, of which 5,640 were upheld, 1,739 partially upheld and 10,050 not upheld. That produces an overall uphold rate of 37.3% across the whole period, using the Ombudsman-consistent definition of upheld cases plus half of partially upheld cases, divided by total decisions.
That long-run rate of 37.3% sits well above the 26.4% recorded in the most recent 90-day window, and also above the corpus-wide baseline of 28.9% calculated across all 398,925 published decisions with an outcome that Veste has analysed. In other words, motor finance uphold rates have historically run hotter than the market as a whole, but the latest window has fallen not just below the category's own long-run average but slightly below the wider baseline too.
What the monthly trend shows
Veste's monthly series for this category spans 25 months, from May 2024 to May 2026. It shows the uphold rate held broadly in the high 30s and low 40s through most of 2024 and early 2025: 39.8% in June 2024, 48.1% in October 2024, 43.1% in December 2024, 41.3% in January 2025, and 44.5% in March 2025.
From around August 2025 the pattern shifts. The uphold rate fell to 30.2% in August 2025 and 29.3% in September 2025, on rising volumes of 263 and 336 decisions respectively. Volumes kept climbing into 2026, alongside further falls in the uphold rate: 27.7% in February 2026 on 233 decisions, 26.6% in March 2026 on 350 decisions, and 24.6% in April 2026 on 226 decisions. The partial month of May 2026, with 104 decisions so far, shows 26.9%.
This matters for how the ten-point drop in the period comparison should be read. It is not an isolated blip confined to the most recent 90 days. The monthly figures suggest the decline set in gradually from around August 2025 and has persisted, with volumes generally rising over the same period. That combination, falling uphold rates alongside rising decision counts, is consistent across several consecutive months rather than a single outlying reading.
The year-on-year picture
Looking at full calendar years, the uphold rate for this category has drifted downward for several years running. It stood at 37.5% in 2022 across 1,335 decisions, 38.1% in 2023 across 1,155 decisions, and 38.0% in 2024 across 1,508 decisions, three years that were all close together. It then fell to 35.5% in 2025 across a much larger 2,505 decisions, and to 28.8% so far in 2026 across 1,121 decisions. All five years meet Veste's minimum sample size.
The scale of the fall between 2025 and 2026 so far, from 35.5% to 28.8%, is consistent with what the monthly and 90-day window data show: a decline that gathered pace through the second half of 2025 and into 2026, rather than something that appeared abruptly in the latest quarter alone. Whether the 2026 figure moves further as the year completes is not something the data can tell us yet, since 2026 is a partial year with 1,121 decisions recorded against a full year of 2,505 in 2025.
Which firms make up the category
Among the individual firms in Veste's motor finance dataset that meet the minimum sample size, uphold rates vary considerably. Startline Motor Finance Limited has the highest uphold rate of the group at 50.6% across 480 decisions. Santander Consumer (UK) Plc stands at 47.1% across 909 decisions, and two entries recorded under variants of BMW Financial Services (GB) Limited's name sit at 47.4% across 728 decisions and 46.1% across 711 decisions respectively. MotoNovo Finance Limited records 45.3% across 546 decisions.
At the other end, Black Horse Limited has the lowest uphold rate among the larger firms at 27.0% across 1,444 decisions, followed by Moneybarn No. 1 Limited at 28.3% across 1,123 decisions and Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited at 31.2% across 1,771 decisions. Mercedes-Benz Financial Services UK Limited sits at 33.4% across 1,146 decisions, and RCI Financial Services Limited at 38.8% across 454 decisions.
It is worth noting that the two BMW entries appear separately in this data because Veste's firm grouping follows the exact business name recorded on each decision rather than rolling subsidiaries into a single parent entity. The same caution applies more broadly: a large banking group's motor finance arm can appear under more than one name in the underlying Ombudsman data, and this analysis has not merged them.
What may be driving the fall, and what the data cannot confirm
Veste's data shows the fall in uphold rate has coincided with rising decision volumes across the category, and with a broader shift in the mix of complaint types feeding into these numbers. Among the claim categories in Veste's dataset relevant to motor finance, PCP / HP mis-selling complaints have an uphold rate of just 19.6% across 2,030 decisions, notably lower than irresponsible lending complaints at 31.9% across 2,200 decisions, and far below goods and services complaints under Section 75 at 49.4% across 7,102 decisions. If the mix of case types reaching decision has shifted toward categories that historically uphold less often, that would be consistent with a falling overall rate without any change in how individual firms are behaving. The supplied data does not break down the motor finance category's monthly totals by claim type, so this remains a plausible explanation rather than a demonstrated one.
Four individual decisions published on 15 May 2026 illustrate the kind of cases making up recent volumes, though they are illustrative only and not a representative sample. Advantage Finance Limited was not upheld in a complaint about a used car's timing chain failure, where an independent expert found the fault was due to wear and tear on a car that was 9.5 years old with 102,100 miles at supply, rather than a defect present at the point of sale. Moneybarn No.1 Limited was not upheld twice on the same day in irresponsible lending complaints, in one case involving a £14,210.62 agreement and an undisclosed £500 broker commission that the ombudsman found did not meet the threshold for unfairness under the relevant legal test, and in another involving a £5,950 agreement where the ombudsman found that proper affordability checks would still likely have led to approval. First Rand Bank Limited, trading as MotoNovo Finance, was also not upheld in an irresponsible lending complaint concerning monthly payments of £231.38, where the ombudsman noted the complainant had made all payments on time and settled the agreement early, which weighed against her claim that the payments were unaffordable.
All four of these particular examples resulted in the complaint not being upheld, but four decisions on a single day cannot be read as evidence of the category's overall direction. They show the kind of factual questions, expert evidence on vehicle condition, the application of affordability tests, and scrutiny of commission arrangements under the Hopcraft test, that recur in this part of the Ombudsman's caseload.
What the data does and does not show
The figures Veste has analysed describe published Ombudsman decisions, not the full population of complaints made to any firm, and not every complaint that reaches the Ombudsman results in a published decision. A firm's published uphold rate reflects the subset of disputes that proceeded to a formal decision, which may differ systematically from complaints resolved earlier in the process. The ten-point fall in the latest 90-day window is real in the data supplied, and it sits within a longer downward drift visible across the monthly series and the year-on-year figures since 2024. What the data cannot establish is why that drift is happening, whether it reflects firms' underlying lending or service practices, changes in the types of cases being referred, or something else in how cases are selected for decision.
The wider implication
The more durable finding here is not the single 90-day comparison but the pattern underneath it. Uphold rates in this category have been easing for roughly two years, from close to 38% in 2022 to 2024 down to 35.5% in 2025 and 28.8% so far in 2026, while the volume of published decisions has grown substantially, from 1,335 in 2022 to 2,505 in 2025. Anyone tracking this category should watch whether the rate stabilises around its current level near the corpus-wide baseline of 28.9%, or continues to fall as 2026 progresses.