More Australians are being angered by insurance companies and investment advice, keeping complaints about financial institutions above 100,000 over the past 12 months.
Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) Chief Ombudsman and Chief Executive Officer David Locke said the 100,000 threshold had been breached for the second year in a row.
Mr Locke said while the 100,745 complaints received in 2024-25 was a slight decline from 104,861 complaints the previous year, it was cold comfort.
“The movement is in the right direction, but receiving 100,000 complaints in a year is still unacceptably high,” he said.
“We’ve now had three years of high complaints. Firms have more work to do to ensure fair responses to complaints are delivered earlier, without people having to take the extra step of coming to us.”
Mr Locke said higher complaints in investments and advice and in general insurance outweighed falls elsewhere.
He said AFCA’s preliminary data snapshot as at June 30 showed:
- Banking and finance 54,581 complaints (down nine percent).
- General insurance 34,231 complaints (up 17 percent).
- Superannuation 6164 complaints (down 16 percent).
- Investments and advice 4193 complaints (up 18 percent).
- Life insurance 1518 complaints (up 5 percent).
Mr Locke said there had been a decrease in scam-related complaints, down 45 percent to 5977, contributing to the overall fall in banking and finance complaints.
“Whilst any decline is positive and we welcome the progress made by Government and industry to prevent scams, caution should be exercised in interpreting AFCA’s scam numbers,” he said.
“AFCA currently only sees a small proportion of scam complaints, and towards the end of the financial year we saw an uptick in some scam types that cause great harm. The number of scam cases are far too high and behind every case is a consumer who has been traumatised and often suffered life changing impacts.”
Mr Locke said the three most complained about financial products overall in 2024-25 were personal transaction accounts, motor vehicle insurance and credit cards.
He said the top three issues were misleading product or service information, delay in insurance claim handling, and service quality.
