The latest set of quarterly data (to December 2018) showed that the service received 161,195 enquiries in the period and took on 92,903 new complaints.

It upheld a third of all the complaints it received, but some products were notably worse than others. For complaints about instalment loans, for example, the uphold rate was 67%. These are like payday loans but paid in smaller instalments. Over half of payday loan complaints were upheld – the ombudsman service received almost twice as many complaints about payday loans as in the whole of 2017/2018, though this did drop in the third quarter as Wonga went bust. Self-invested personal pensions and current accounts also had higher numbers of complaints upheld.

PPI continued to be the most complained-about financial product, with 40,855 new complaints. PPI complaints made up nearly 44% of all complaints received by the ombudsman service. The cut-off date for making a PPI claim is 29 August 2019, which may be boosting the number of complaints as consumers rush to beat the deadline. The uphold rate for PPI increased slightly from 26% to 29%.

Caroline Wayman, chief ombudsman and chief executive of the Financial Ombudsman Service, said: “The number of PPI complaints we have taken on recently topped two million, and PPI cases still make up a significant proportion of our work. However, we deal with complaints about the full spectrum of financial products, and we would urge anyone who has a complaint about a financial business to get in touch with us.”