The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) is targeting a 7% improvement in underlying productivity year on year.
This targeted increase was announced in its plan and budget for 2022/23 published on 30 March.
The FOS is going through a restructure process through an action plan and hopes the changes will further improve productivity.
FOS set itself the goal to increase its productivity by 25% by 1 April 2024 to remain sustainable.
In a statement it says: “Overall, our transformation will be seen as successful if we have improved our productivity and customer satisfaction, reduced customer waiting times, and created a financially sustainable organisation that is able to adapt to demand and emerging issues in a sustainable way.”
In addition, FOS is investing an additional £14m in case-handlers. This is to give greater accountability to leaders and push cases queues down.
FOS stated it will continue to look for opportunities to resolve cases more quickly.
During the upcoming tax year, FOS is expecting to receive around 177,000 new complaints and resolve 220,500.
Moreover, FOS has increased its budget for 2022-2023 from £245.7m to £291.7m. It said it would be invested in tackling the backlog of cases.
FOS will also look to reduce the number of free cases available. This is to cut its cost base.
As a result, FOS expects is cost base for 2022-2023 to be smaller than the £293.8m it had forecast. It should be around £291.7m instead.
This will still be an 18% raise on the £249.4m levied for the current year.
The ombudsman looks to fund this through a levy increase of £10m to £106m and cuts to its cost base.
FOS also aims to reduce the number of free cases for individual firms from 25 to three.
Firms in its group account fee arrangement will get 15 free cases instead of 50, while the fee for individual cases over the free case limit will stay at £750.
FOS chief executive and chief ombudsman Nausicaa Delfas said: “In the last financial year, we took significant steps to put the FOS on a better path for the future. We published our action plan, together with our periodic review, and have been driving down our backlog of cases.
“In the next financial year, we will be investing to make a step change in performance, by developing our technologies and implementing our new operating model.
“The changes we make will help deliver a better service for all our customers and will allow the organisation to become financially sustainable for the future.”
