A small rise against a much larger fall
In the most recent 90-day window covered by Veste's data, the uphold rate for the "Other regulated complaint" category, the Financial Ombudsman's catch-all for regulated complaints that do not fit any of its 29 named categories, stood at 11.9%. In the prior 90-day window it was 9.1%. That is a rise of 2.8 percentage points.
On its own, a rise looks like news. But the volume behind it tells a different story. The current window contained 333 decisions, down from 582 in the prior window, a fall of 249 decisions, or 42.8%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not statistically meaningless, but a 2.8-point movement on a shrinking base is a much smaller change in absolute uphold numbers than the percentage swing might suggest, and it needs to be read alongside the monthly series rather than in isolation.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly trend data for this category runs for 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. Read across that span, the recent uptick looks less like a turning point and more like a plateau within a longer decline.
Uphold rates were consistently higher in the second half of 2024: 24.6% in July 2024, 29.9% in August 2024, and a peak of 30.8% in September 2024. From there the rate drifted down through 2025, dipping as low as 12.6% in November 2025 and 13.2% in December 2025, before falling further to 5.4% in January 2026, the lowest single month in the whole series. It recovered somewhat over the following months, reaching 15.6% in April 2026, before falling back to 9.5% in May 2026 and 10.5% in June 2026.
Against that backdrop, the period comparison's rise from 9.1% to 11.9% sits comfortably within the range of monthly fluctuation seen across late 2025 and 2026, rather than marking a departure from it. Volumes have also varied considerably from month to month, from as few as 59 decisions in October 2025 to 262 in March 2026, which is itself a reminder that this category's monthly figures can move a great deal even without any change in the underlying pattern of Ombudsman decisions.
The longer-term picture, year on year
Veste's year-on-year figures for this category cover 2022 to 2026 and show a clearer arc than the recent 90-day comparison. In 2022 the uphold rate was 15.6% across 1,231 decisions. It rose to 19.1% in 2023 across 1,045 decisions, then to 25.0% in 2024 across 998 decisions, its highest point in the series. It then fell back to 18.8% in 2025 across 1,008 decisions, and stands at 10.1% for 2026 so far, across 915 decisions.
That multi-year decline, from a quarter of decisions upheld in 2024 to almost half that share in 2026, is the more significant movement in this data. The 2.8-point rise in the latest 90-day window has not come close to reversing it. It is a small uptick inside a much bigger fall.
Where this category sits against others
The overall uphold rate for Other regulated complaint across the full period on record, from April 2013 to June 2026, is 18.3%, based on 18,717 decisions, of which 2,807 were upheld outright and 1,238 partially upheld. That headline rate sits below the uphold rate for the whole Financial Ombudsman corpus of 403,326 decisions, which stands at 28.8%. In other words, complaints landing in this last-resort category have historically been less likely to succeed than the average published decision across all categories, and the current 2026 year-to-date rate of 10.1% is considerably further below that baseline still.
Among related product categories tracked by Veste, uphold rates vary widely: motor insurance stands at 27.3% across 2,027 decisions, home insurance at 24.2% across 1,228, and other regulated product (a distinct category from the one examined here) at 21.6% across 4,350. Packaged bank accounts sit much lower, at 6.5% across 4,000 decisions. Other regulated complaint's all-time rate of 18.3% falls in the middle of that range, though its most recent year-to-date figure of 10.1% is closer to the packaged bank account end.
Firm mix: a caveat, not a ranking
Veste's top firms data for complaint categories more broadly is dominated by large banking and insurance names, with Lloyds Bank PLC recording 1,182 decisions and a 7.6% uphold rate, Bank of Scotland Plc 1,037 decisions at 6.7%, and National Westminster Bank Plc 963 decisions at 6.1%. Barclays Bank Plc recorded 844 decisions at 15.9%, notably higher than several peers, while UK Insurance Limited's 261 decisions carry the highest uphold rate among the ten firms listed, at 23.6%.
It is important to be precise about what this firm list represents: these are the firms with the largest published decision counts overall, not a breakdown specific to the Other regulated complaint category alone. Firms are also counted by the exact business name recorded on each decision, so subsidiaries of the same banking group, such as Barclays Bank Plc and Barclays Bank UK PLC, or Lloyds Bank PLC and Bank of Scotland Plc, appear as separate entries and are not combined into a single group figure. Any apparent difference between two entities carrying a shared parent brand should be read with that in mind rather than treated as a meaningful divergence in group-wide performance.
Individual decisions as illustration
Veste's supplied case examples, all decided on 29 June 2026, show the range of issues that can fall into a broad regulated-complaint bucket. In one case, a complaint against American Express Services Europe Limited concerning a declined travel insurance claim under a war exclusion was not upheld, with the ombudsman finding that American Express acted only as an intermediary and was not responsible for the underlying insurer's claims decision. A similar reasoning pattern featured in a complaint against Monzo Bank Limited over a declined breakdown recovery claim linked to its Monzo Max Plan packaged account, where the ombudsman again found the packaged-account provider was not responsible for a third-party claims handler's decision. A complaint against N.I.I.B. Group Limited, trading as Northridge Finance, over the termination of a hire purchase agreement was also not upheld, after the firm supplied documentary evidence of compliance with statutory notice requirements that had not initially been available. By contrast, a complaint against Hutchison 3G UK Limited, trading as Three, concerning three fixed sum loan agreements taken out fraudulently in the complainant's name, was upheld, with the ombudsman citing voice analysis of call recordings and delivery-address evidence pointing to unauthorised borrowing by a third party.
These four decisions cannot be taken as representative of the category as a whole. They illustrate the type of case that can be classified as "other regulated complaint" and the kind of evidence ombudsmen weigh, but they are single outcomes, not a sample from which a broader pattern can be drawn.
What the data does, and does not, show
The data shows a 2.8 percentage point rise in the uphold rate for this category between two 90-day windows, accompanied by a substantial 42.8% fall in decision volume, and it shows both windows meet the minimum sample threshold for comparison. It shows a longer-run decline in the annual uphold rate from 25.0% in 2024 to 10.1% so far in 2026. It does not show why fewer decisions have been published in this category recently, and it does not show why the uphold rate has fallen over the medium term. Veste's data does not include information on complaint handling times, case mix within the category, or the reasons individual firms' outcomes vary, so any explanation for the underlying drivers of these movements would go beyond what this evidence supports.
It is also worth restating the general limitation that applies across all Veste analysis of this kind: published Ombudsman decisions are not the same population as all complaints made to a firm. Many complaints are resolved before reaching a published decision, and the categories analysed here reflect only those that were formally decided and published.
The practical takeaway
For anyone tracking this category, the more useful figure to watch is not the short-term percentage-point movement between two 90-day windows, which sits well within the range of noise seen across the monthly series, but the longer year-on-year trajectory. That trajectory shows a category whose uphold rate has more than halved since its 2024 peak, on a corpus that remains well above the minimum sample size needed for reliable comparison. Whether the small recent uptick continues or fades will only be clear once further quarters of data are published.