AFCA: Financial difficulty complaints dropped by nearly 40% in 2020-21

In 2020-21, individual consumers and small businesses made 70,510 complaints to AFCA. Overall, complaints were down 12 per cent on 2019-20.

AFCA’s Chief Ombudsman, David Locke, said. “Significantly, complaints involving financial difficulty were down nearly 40 per cent from the numbers we saw the previous year,” Mr Locke said. “That’s a great outcome and reflects the positive response from government and industry to the impact of COVID.

The most complained about product in 2020-21 was credit cards, accounting for 14 per cent of all complaints, followed by home loans (9 per cent) and personal transaction accounts (8 per cent). With credit cards, the most common issues were default listings and unauthorised transactions – the latter accounting for 11 per cent of card complaints.

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Top 3 AFCA Complaint Categories 20/21 (percentage of total complaints)

1. (14%) Credit Cards (of which 11% were unauthorised transactions)
2. (9%) Home Loans
3. (8%) Personal Transaction Accounts

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Electronic Banking Complaints were up 76%, of which:

• (28%) were Unauthorised Transactions
• (19%) were Mistaken Internet Payments

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