The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has secured up to £22m in redress for customers following the launch of a settlement initiative.

The Ombudsman launched its temporary outcomes code initiative in November 2021, to encourage businesses to proactively settle complaints more quickly. It ran for a limited period until March 2022.

FOS says it had worked with more than 90 businesses, which resulted has in 6,877 offers being made to customers totalling £22m.

This included more than £10m of redress in “authorised” scam complaints, with over 2,000 victims being refunded the money they had lost.

The average offer to customers made through the initiative was £3,200 per case.

Alongside the 2,000 fraud cases, FOS says its initiative has helped resolve around 4,800 customer complaints about a wide range of issues including e-money services, personal loans, motor finance and credit card purchases.

The top 10 financial businesses who made offers to customers as part of this initiative included Barclays, NatWest and Lloyd Banking group.

Financial Ombudsman Service chief executive Nausicaa Delfas says the initiative had helped customers get their complaints resolved more quickly.

“This was just one of a range of initiatives we put in place to address the large backlog of complaints received during Covid-19. The backlog is now a third of what it was at the beginning of last year. We are now moving forward with our Action Plan to change and improve the Financial Ombudsman for the future,” she adds.

Last week, the FOS reported its best performance in three years adding that it has reduced its total stock of cases from 164,529 to 112,000 in the last financial year.

FOS also said it has cut the unallocated backlog of cases from around 90,000 to just over 37,000 as well as resolving 218,750 cases against a target of 220,000.