CLOSE TO €1 million was paid by financial providers to settle complaints during formal investigations last year, including a case where a bank put a woman’s house up for sale without informing her.

The Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman (FSPO) today published the overview of complaints that it received last year.

The role of the FSPO is to resolve complaints from consumers, including small businesses and other organisations, against financial service providers and pension providers.

It received 4,781 complaints last year, a slight increase on the 4,658 complaints received in 2021.

4,647 of these complaints received last year were closed, with the FSPO delivering outcomes worth more than €5 million to consumers.

Around €3.4 million was paid by financial providers through 1,173 mediation settlements.

But in cases where early stage mediation doesn’t work, the case may be transferred to a formal investigation.

Of the 629 complaints that were transferred through the investigation services, 96 were upheld, substantially upheld, or partially upheld.

The combined value of these decisions was €616,686.

74 cases were settled during the investigation process on foot of an on-the-record offer from the financial provider.

€174,495 was provided in redress from providers in these cases, where the offer in question was “reasonable and adequate to redress the conduct giving rise to the complaint”, and thus no formal direction by the Ombudsman was required.

However, close to €1 million (€965,527) was also paid to complainants to settle cases during the FSPO’s formal investigation process.

These are cases which were resolved via a settlement before the conclusion of the FSPO’s formal investigation process.

There were 116 of these instances, and in one such case, a woman was offered €120,000 in compensation, which she accepted, after a bank placed her house for sale on the open market without notifying her.

The woman took out a mortgage to buy a property in 2010 and later in the same year, her home was badly damaged by flooding and she moved home.

She completed a “change of address”, which alerted the bank to her new address.

Her mortgage account then fell into arrears and she sought an agreement with the bank regarding mortgage repayments.

However, she said the bank was slow to respond to correspondence from her solicitor, which increased her mortgage arrears and affected her credit rating.

Several years later, she tried to sell this property in order to pay her debt.

The woman said she regularly attended to the property to collect post. However, on one visit, she discovered that the property had been place on the market without her knowledge.

The locks had also been changed and she could not gain entry.

With the assistance of her solicitor, she prevented the sale of the property and went on to sell the house for a sum that was almost €80,000 more than the price that was sought by the bank.

The bank “apologised for the number of years that the matter had been ongoing and acknowledged that mistakes had been made while dealing with her mortgage account and property”.

Meanwhile, the FSPO identified financial service providers against which three or more complaints were upheld, substantially upheld, or partially upheld, during 2022.

Bank of Ireland led the way, with ten complaints upheld against it, followed by Permanent TSB which had nine complaints upheld, substantially upheld, of partially upheld against it.

The FSPO also received 139 new tracker mortgage interest rates complaints.

It means the office has been dealing with complaints of this nature for 15 years.

Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman, Liam Sloyan said that while this figure represents a “downward trajectory, it is notable that 139 new complaints of this nature were made to the FSPO”.

Of the 24 7 tracker mortgage interest rate complaints closed in 2022, only three of which upheld the complaint.