A rate rise, but on a shrinking base
Over the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, the published uphold rate for decisions naming Shawbrook Bank Limited rose to 8.2%, up from 3.8% in the prior 90-day window. That is a rise of 4.4 percentage points. At the same time the number of decisions published fell substantially, from 562 in the prior window to 352 in the current one, a drop of 210 decisions, or 37.4%.
Both windows comfortably clear Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so this is not a case of a handful of cases swinging a small percentage. But a rise of 4.4 percentage points on a base uphold rate below 10% is still a modest absolute movement, and it needs to be read against a monthly series that has moved by far larger amounts within the past two years.
The headline numbers
Across the full published record, Veste holds 2,404 decisions naming Shawbrook Bank Limited, dating from first sight on 3 September 2013 to the most recent on 22 May 2026. Of these, 395 were upheld, 74 were partially upheld and 1,935 were not upheld, giving an all-time uphold rate of 18% under Veste's definition, which counts a partial uphold as half a decision (upheld plus half of partially upheld, divided by total).
That all-time figure sits below the corpus-wide baseline. Across the entire Veste database of 399,665 decisions with a recorded outcome, the overall uphold rate is 28.9%. Shawbrook Bank Limited's all-time rate of 18% is therefore around eleven percentage points below the market-wide figure, though the most recent 90-day rate of 8.2% is even further below that baseline.
What the monthly series shows
The monthly trend, running for the 25 months from May 2024 to May 2026, is considerably more volatile than the 90-day comparison alone suggests. Monthly uphold rates for Shawbrook Bank Limited have ranged from 0% in some early months of the series, such as May and June 2024, up to 72.2% in March 2025 and 63.6% in January 2025. These are all months with modest volumes, several with fewer than 20 decisions, which makes them prone to large swings from just a few cases moving one way or the other.
What stands out more than the rate itself is the change in volume from late 2025 onwards. Monthly totals had generally sat between roughly 10 and 30 decisions through most of 2024 and 2025. Then December 2025 saw 155 decisions, January 2026 saw 215, February 2026 saw 224 and March 2026 saw 224 again, before falling back to 35 in April 2026 and 57 in May 2026. Uphold rates during that surge in volume were low: 6.5% in December 2025, 1.4% in January 2026, 4.2% in February 2026 and 7.8% in March 2026. April and May 2026, the two months that fall inside the most recent 90-day comparison window, show rates of 11.4% and 9.6% respectively, both somewhat higher than the trough of January and February but still well below the peaks seen in early-to-mid 2025.
So the 4.4 percentage point rise identified in the period comparison reflects a partial recovery from an unusually low-uphold, high-volume period around the turn of the year, rather than a return to the higher rates recorded in the first half of 2025.
Annual context
The year-on-year figures reinforce that 2025 and 2026 look different from the years before them, both in scale and in outcome mix. In 2022, Veste recorded 646 decisions naming Shawbrook Bank Limited with an uphold rate of 12.9%. That fell to 165 decisions in 2023, with the uphold rate rising to 26.4%. In 2024, volume fell further to 140 decisions, with an uphold rate of 23.6%. Then volume rose sharply to 339 decisions in 2025, with the uphold rate climbing further to 28.6%, its highest point across the five years shown. In the year-to-date figures for 2026, which will include the high-volume winter months described above, the total already stands at 755 decisions, well above any full prior year in the series, with an uphold rate of 5.2%, the lowest of the five years shown.
All five annual figures meet Veste's minimum sample size, so they can be compared with reasonable confidence in terms of sample robustness. What they show is a firm whose annual decision volume has varied considerably, from a low of 140 in 2024 to 755 already recorded for 2026, and whose annual uphold rate has moved from 12.9% to 28.6% and back down to 5.2% over that same span. A firm's published decision volume in a given year is shaped by how FOS schedules and publishes its casework, not solely by underlying complaint activity, so these swings should not automatically be read as reflecting Shawbrook's underlying complaint-handling performance changing at the same pace.
What the case examples illustrate
Veste's supplied examples of individual decisions all relate to a similar type of case: loans used to finance Fractional Club timeshare membership purchases, with complaints raised under Section 75 and Section 140A of the Consumer Credit Act 1974, and allegations concerning Regulation 14(3) of the Timeshare Regulations 2010, which prohibits marketing timeshares as investments.
Of the four examples supplied, three were not upheld and one was partially upheld. In the partially upheld case, involving loans taken out between 2013 and 2018, the ombudsman found that a 2013 purchase complaint was time-barred, a 2014 purchase complaint succeeded because the supplier's marketing of the product as an investment was found to have materially influenced the purchase decision, and a 2018 purchase complaint was rejected for lack of evidence, though the ombudsman noted the lender should have carried out more thorough affordability checks.
In the three not-upheld examples, the ombudsman's reasoning followed a consistent pattern: even where a supplier may have breached Regulation 14(3) by marketing a timeshare as an investment, the ombudsman found this did not render the credit relationship unfair under Section 140A unless it could be shown to have materially influenced the complainant's decision to purchase. In each of these cases, the complainants' own evidence pointed to motivations other than investment return, such as wanting holiday rights, exiting an existing timeshare membership, or receiving money back at the end of a membership term. One case also examined an undisclosed commission of £945.60, representing 5% of borrowing, and another examined a commission of £320, representing 8% of borrowing; in both instances the ombudsman found the commission too modest to render the credit relationship unfair on its own.
These four decisions cannot be treated as representative of the roughly 2,404 decisions in the full Shawbrook Bank Limited record, still less of the wider swings in monthly volume described above. They are included here as illustrations of the kind of dispute that recurs in the published record, not as proof of a broader trend.
Related complaint categories
Across the eight related complaint categories supplied by Veste, uphold rates vary from 12.4% for other regulated complaints (186 decisions) up to 34.4% for irresponsible lending (141 decisions). Goods and services under Section 75, the category most relevant to several of the case examples above, carries an uphold rate of 16.3% across 1,560 decisions in Veste's database, close to Shawbrook Bank Limited's all-time rate of 18%. Investment mis-selling, relevant to the Regulation 14(3) arguments seen in the case examples, has an uphold rate of 17.1% across 260 decisions. These category-level figures span the whole market, not just Shawbrook Bank Limited, and are included to give scale to the kinds of disputes described in the examples rather than to compare the firm directly against them.
What the data does not show
Veste's dataset covers published Ombudsman decisions only, which is a different population from the full set of complaints made to Shawbrook Bank Limited; many complaints are resolved before reaching a published decision, and this analysis says nothing about that earlier stage. The firm-naming convention used throughout, recording the business name exactly as it appears on each decision, means that any related entities within the same banking group, if they exist, would appear separately in Veste's records and are not combined into a single group total here.
The data also does not establish why decision volumes rose so sharply in the winter of 2025 into 2026, nor why the uphold rate fell during that surge before partially recovering in April and May 2026. Veste's figures show the pattern; they do not, on their own, explain its cause.
The takeaway
The 4.4 percentage point rise in Shawbrook Bank Limited's uphold rate between the prior and current 90-day windows is real and drawn from samples large enough to compare, but it sits within a monthly series that has swung far more dramatically over the past two years, including a period of very high volume and very low uphold rates around the turn of 2025 into 2026. Anyone tracking this firm's published Ombudsman record would do better to watch the monthly pattern over several more months than to draw firm conclusions from a single 90-day movement.