The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) interim chief executive Nausicaa Delfas is confident the organisation can deal with greater complexity from ongoing changes.

Delfas and FOS chair of the board Baroness Zahida Manzoor were answering questions from the Treasury select committee yesterday (9 February 2022).

This comes after FOS announced an action plan to improve the service delivered to customers towards the end of last year.

Delfas explained why she is confident FOS is able to overcome this challenge.

“We’ve already changed some of the way in which we operate,” she said.

The changes include allocating cases to specific specialist teams or reducing the time investigators spent answering phone calls to focus on cases.

Delfas added that FOS is also working with the industry to settle cases proactively.

The interim chief executive announced that over 4,000 cases have been resolved in that way. As a result, over £10m of redress has been paid to consumers.

She said: “We’re already using various innovative means to improve productivity to get through our cases more quickly.

“The changes that we will be making will ensure that we can maximise the benefits of our expertise and build on that.”

Delfas also announced that FOS’s target operating model will be complete in about a month time.

FOS is also in the process of reshaping its management of casework performance.

She also explained that the changes in the nature of the cases FOS is dealing with have impacted its productivity.

Delfas said: “Historically, the work of FOS was 78% PPI cases, it’s now 4%. In the last year, the more diverse cases have increased by 60%.

“The reason why this is important is because most of the PPI cases were resolved in a more standardised way and that there were the economies of scale that could be delivered through that method.

“Now we have a broader range of cases, and as the financial services market innovates, we’re likely to get other cases.

“We need to make sure that we are agile and able to meet those challenges.”

FOS recently committed to have no case older than 18 months by the end of the financial year.

Delfas announced that FOS was on track to reach this objective.

She said: “Unless there was a reason beyond our control to prevent that, such as a judicial review, we’re on track to achieve that.

“We expect that there may only be a handful of cases that we wouldn’t be able to resolve at the end of this financial year, but we’ve made significant inroads into that.”