A higher uphold rate on a smaller base
Between the previous 90-day window and the most recent one, the proportion of published Financial Ombudsman decisions upheld against National Westminster Bank Public Limited Company rose from 10.2% to 14.8%, a movement of 4.6 percentage points. That increase came alongside a sharp fall in the number of decisions published: 145 in the current window against 285 in the prior one, a drop of 140 decisions, or 49.1%.
Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not dismissed on size grounds alone. But a rate built on 145 decisions, of which a meaningful share will be partial upholds rather than full ones, moves more easily than one built on a larger base. The fall in volume itself is worth treating carefully: it says nothing about NatWest's underlying complaint-handling and everything about the pace at which the Ombudsman has published outcomes for this firm in the period covered.
The numbers behind the headline
Across the full period for which Veste holds decisions on this firm, from 18 March 2025 to 15 June 2026, NatWest has seen 1,179 published outcomes, of which 118 were fully upheld, 84 partially upheld and 976 not upheld. That produces an overall uphold rate, calculated on Veste's standard basis of fully upheld decisions plus half of partial upholds divided by total decisions, of 13.6%. That figure sits below the corpus-wide baseline uphold rate of 28.8% across the 401,815 decisions in Veste's full dataset, indicating that decisions against NatWest have, on this measure, been upheld less often than the average across all firms and products Veste tracks.
Year-on-year figures show some movement too. In 2025, NatWest's uphold rate across 769 decisions was 14.4%. In 2026 to date, across 410 decisions, it stands at 12.1%. Both years meet the minimum sample size. Read alongside the 90-day comparison, this suggests the recent uptick in the latest quarter has not yet been enough to push the calendar-year 2026 rate above the 2025 level, even though the most recent 90-day window shows a higher rate than the one before it.
What the monthly trend shows
Veste's monthly series runs for 16 months, from March 2025 to June 2026. It is uneven rather than steadily rising or falling. The uphold rate opened the series at 28.7% in March 2025 on 47 decisions, fell to 11.5% in April 2025 on 52 decisions, then bounced to 21.4% in May 2025 on 49 decisions. Through the summer and autumn of 2025 it sat mostly in a band between roughly 10% and 18%, on monthly volumes that grew considerably: September 2025 alone produced 112 decisions at a 10.3% uphold rate, and March 2026 produced 146 decisions, the largest single month in the series, at a 10.3% uphold rate again.
The most recent three months tell a different story in terms of volume. April 2026 produced just 20 decisions, May 2026 produced 34, and June 2026 (a partial month, given the corpus cutoff of 16 June) produced 20. Uphold rates in these thinner months swung more widely: 15.0% in April, 25.0% in May, and 5.0% in June, the last of these based on zero fully upheld decisions, two partial upholds and 18 not upheld outcomes. A month with 20 decisions is a small sample by any standard, and a single decision moves the rate by five percentage points. Readers should treat month-to-month swings of this kind as expected statistical noise in a low-volume series rather than evidence of a shift in how complaints are being resolved.
Firm and category context
Veste's top-firm comparison table for this analysis is empty, meaning no ranking of NatWest against other named firms can be responsibly drawn from the supplied evidence, and none is attempted here. It is worth restating that firms are counted by the exact business name recorded on each published decision. National Westminster Bank Public Limited Company is treated as its own entity in this dataset; any related businesses within the same banking group that publish decisions under a different registered name would appear separately and are not combined with the figures above.
Veste does hold category-level uphold rates that provide useful context, though these are corpus-wide figures for each issue type rather than NatWest-specific breakdowns. Irresponsible lending complaints across the dataset have an uphold rate of 19.9% on 188 decisions. Mortgage administration and arrears handling complaints run at 16.7% on 51 decisions. Service failures generally sit at 16.5% on 115 decisions. Account administration errors sit at 15.4% on 78 decisions, and card or payment disputes at 14.9% on 94 decisions. Credit file or adverse marker disputes stand at 17.6% on 37 decisions. By contrast, fraud reimbursement complaints under the Authorised Push Payment scam regime sit markedly lower, at 8.3% across 420 decisions, and account closure without notice complaints sit at 8.8% across 74 decisions. These are dataset-wide rates for the issue category, not figures specific to NatWest, but they illustrate that uphold rates vary considerably by complaint type, and that categories involving lending affordability tend to be upheld more often than categories involving fraud liability or account closure decisions.
Illustrative decisions
Four recent published decisions against NatWest, all dated between 11 and 15 June 2026, were not upheld. One concerned a customer who complained that a debit card was cancelled and replaced without her being told, with the Ombudsman finding NatWest had followed its procedures and noting she had several opportunities between February and May 2025 to query declined transactions before raising the complaint in September 2025. A second concerned a customer who had been coerced into disclosing card and PIN details during a blackmail incident; the Ombudsman found his consent, though given under duress, was valid under the Payment Service Regulations 2017, making the transactions authorised, while also finding NatWest's card monitoring had not fallen short, since the new cards had no spending history against which to judge unusual activity. A third concerned a £4,000 credit card issued in October 2022, where the Ombudsman found NatWest's affordability checks, based on credit reference data and disposable income calculations, were reasonable and proportionate. A fourth concerned a charity that had been declined a Business Current Account needed to access a payment platform with higher limits; the Ombudsman found NatWest was entitled to set its own account-opening criteria and did not have to disclose or justify that decision.
These four cases are presented as illustrations of the range of issues the Ombudsman has recently considered involving this firm, not as evidence of a pattern. Each turned on its own facts, and in each the Ombudsman found no basis to uphold the complaint.
What this does and does not show
The headline finding, that NatWest's uphold rate rose by 4.6 percentage points between two 90-day windows while volume fell by nearly half, is a genuine feature of the published data. What it does not establish is a change in how NatWest is handling complaints, nor any deterioration or improvement in its underlying conduct. Published Ombudsman decisions are a filtered subset of all complaints made to a firm: only disputes that reach a formal ombudsman decision, after earlier stages of resolution have not resolved matters, appear in this dataset. A fall in the number of decisions published in a quarter can reflect publication timing, case mix or throughput at the Ombudsman service, not necessarily a change in complaint volumes at the firm itself.
The monthly series shows that swings of several percentage points from one period to the next have occurred repeatedly over the past 16 months, including larger swings than the one highlighted in the latest 90-day comparison, often on similarly modest monthly volumes. That history is a reasonable basis for caution before treating the latest movement as the start of a trend.
The wider implication
The most useful conclusion from this data is not that something has changed for the worse or better at NatWest, but that the sample sizes involved in short-window comparisons for a single firm are small enough that individual quarters can move by several percentage points without representing a genuine shift. NatWest's overall uphold rate across the full 1,179 decisions Veste holds, 13.6%, remains below the 28.8% baseline across the whole corpus of 401,815 decisions. Anyone tracking this firm's Ombudsman record would do better to watch the multi-month trend and the calendar-year comparison than any single 90-day window in isolation.
Methodology
This analysis covers published Financial Ombudsman decisions naming National Westminster Bank Public Limited Company held by Veste, from first sighting on 18 March 2025 to 15 June 2026, a total of 1,179 decisions. The uphold rate is calculated as fully upheld decisions plus half of partially upheld decisions, divided by total decisions. Comparisons used are the supplied 90-day period-on-period window (current 145 decisions, prior 285 decisions), the supplied year-on-year figures for 2025 and 2026, the supplied 16-month monthly trend running from March 2025 to June 2026, and the supplied corpus-wide baseline uphold rate of 28.8% across 401,815 decisions. Windows are anchored to the newest decision date in the corpus rather than to the current date, because the Ombudsman publishes decisions in arrears. Firms are counted using the exact business name recorded on each decision; related entities within the same banking group are not combined. Published Ombudsman decisions represent a subset of all complaints made to a firm, not the total complaint population, and the minimum sample size applied throughout is 30 decisions.