Foreign currency enquiries represent negligible percentage of total in Q3 FY2018 – UK Financial Ombudsman
The UK Financial Ombudsman received only 65 enquiries about foreign currencies in the quarter to December 31, 2017, a negligible percentage of the total of 147,775 enquiries handled during the period.
Enquiries about foreign currencies, spread betting, and derivatives accounted for a negligible percentage of the total of 147,775 enquiries from consumers received by the UK Financial Ombudsman service in the third quarter of the 2017/2018 financial year.
According to the latest numbers, published earlier today, the Financial Ombudsman received humble 65 enquiries about foreign currencies in the quarter to December 31, 2017. This is down from the 86 such enquiries received in the preceding quarter. Only 7 of the enquiries resulted in complaints passed to the Ombudsman and only 18% of these complaints were upheld in the three months to the end of December 2017.
The rate of upholding of such complaints has been traditionally low. During the quarter to end-September 2017, the rate was 17%.
The number of enquiries about spread betting was 43 in the quarter to end-December 2017, marginally up from the 42 such enquiries handled in the preceding quarter. The rate of cases upheld by the Ombudsman was 28%.
The Ombudsman received 39 enquiries about derivatives in the three months to December 31, 2017, slightly up from 37 in the second quarter. Only 9 of these enquiries were taken to the Ombudsman and only 18% were upheld.
We are curious to see whether the statistics for the quarter to March 31, 2018 will feature any data about binary options complaints. As FinanceFeeds has reported, effective January 3, 2018, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) took over the oversight of the binary options sector. This means that individual complaints can be referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service. However, those protections will not compensate investors for any losses from trading.
Earlier this week, the FCA has published more data illustrating the damage caused to investors as a result of binary options fraud. The average daily losses due to binary options scam exceed £87,000 in the UK, according to the numbers. The regulator had earlier published a list of 94 firms without FCA authorisation that it understands to be offering binary options trading to UK consumers.
