FCA misses target for answering firms’ phone calls in 2021/22
The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published its operating service metrics for 2021/22.
The regulator monitors the performance of its telephone service by the number of calls that are ended before they are answered. This happens if no advisers are available to answer a call promptly or the caller decides to end the call rather than wait.
The FCA aims for no more than 5% of unanswered telephone calls for both firms and consumers. This is a voluntary target. The regulator has achieved this target this year for consumers but has missed this target for firms.
Contact volumes for the firm hub over the course of the year were similar to the previous year [+2%], but calls often came in large spikes because of communications relating to:
- The FCA migration to new cloud-based systems for regulatory reporting and invoicing – 17,500 firms needing help accessing the new systems generating 33,000 calls.
- The introduction of the new Firm Data Attestation – which requires all firms to confirm the accuracy of their information displayed on the Financial Services Register annually. This resulted in 9,200 firms needing help across 13,400 calls.
- Coronavirus (Covid-19) Financial Resilience Survey: the FCA resilience surveys resulted in 3,000 calls from a total of 2,380 firms.
- The end of forbearance on late/missing regulatory reporting and recommencement of fines for late/non-submission.
During 2021/22, the FCA received a lower number of complaints (1,212 in 2021/22, compared to 1,596 in 2020/21). This is because in 2020/21 the regulator received a large number of complaints (498) regarding its regulation of London Capital & Finance (LCF), but it received fewer of these complaints (142) in 2021/22.
The FCA has continued to demonstrate improvements on last year, such as improving its acknowledgements response in 2021/22 by 28 percentage points compared to the previous year, narrowly missing its target of 95%.
Having cleared its backlog of cases, in the second half of 2021/22, the FCA was able to improve its performance for:
- local area complaint completion to 82% (Nov ’21 – March ’22) and
- Stage 1 completion to 87% (Oct ’21 – March ’22)
The FCA expects the trajectory of improvement against the metrics to continue in 2022/23 and whilst there has been progress it recognises that it has more to do.