UK Financial Ombudsman Decisions

Search and extract final decisions from the Financial Ombudsman Service, the UK's official dispute resolution body for financial complaints: reference, date, business, sector, outcome, summary and a link to the full PDF.

🔍 What does UK Financial Ombudsman Decisions do?

It runs a search against the FOS decisions database and returns every matching decision as a clean row of data, ready for a spreadsheet, a database or your own product.

• Filters by business name, for example "Barclays", "Revolut" or "Aviva"
• Filters by outcome, upheld or not upheld
• Filters by financial sector, such as banking, insurance, investments or PPI
• Filters by keyword or product type
• Filters by date range
• Paginates automatically through results

Over 384,000 final decisions are publicly available, covering banking, insurance, mortgages, investments, pensions, consumer credit and PPI.

📊 What data can I extract from the FOS?

One row per decision:

Field	Description
reference	Decision reference number, for example DRN-6014203
date	Date the decision was issued
business	The financial business the complaint was about
outcome	"Upheld" or "Not upheld"
sector	Financial sector, for example Banking, Insurance or Investments
summary	Complaint description excerpt
pageCount	Length of the full decision document
pdfUrl	Direct link to the full decision PDF
decisionUrl	Link to the decision page
sourceUrl	Search results page this was found on
scrapedAt	Timestamp of when the data was collected

💡 Why scrape Financial Ombudsman decisions?

Claims management. Monitor decisions against specific lenders for motor finance, PPI or irresponsible lending, and prioritise cases by what is actually being upheld.

Compliance and complaint handling. Track decisions against your firm and your competitors, and see how ombudsmen are ruling on a complaint type before it reaches you.

Precedent research. Bulk extract decisions on fraud, scams or pension mis-selling for case preparation.

Risk models and AI training. Hundreds of thousands of structured dispute narratives with a labelled outcome on each one.

🚀 How do I use UK Financial Ombudsman Decisions?

1. Click Try for free.
2. Enter a keyword or product type, for example motor finance commission.
3. Narrow it with businessName, sector, outcome and a dateFrom and dateTo range.
4. Set maxResults to cap the run, up to 500.
5. Click Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull them from the API.

⬇️ Input

{
  "keyword": "motor finance commission",
  "sector": "banking-credit-mortgages",
  "outcome": "upheld",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Field	Type	Default	What it does
keyword	string		Search by keyword or product type, e.g. "motor finance", "fraud scam"
businessName	string		Filter by a specific financial business, e.g. "Barclays", "Revolut"
sector	string	all sectors	Restrict to one sector, e.g. banking-credit-mortgages, insurance, ppi
outcome	string	both	upheld or not-upheld
dateFrom	string		Only decisions issued on or after this date (DD/MM/YYYY)
dateTo	string		Only decisions issued on or before this date (DD/MM/YYYY)
maxResults	integer	50	Maximum number of decisions to return, up to 500

⬆️ Output

Table view

Results arrive as a Decisions table you can sort and filter in the Console, with the business, sector, outcome and date lined up for scanning.

JSON

A typical row:

{
  "reference": "DRN-6416620",
  "business": "Barclays Bank UK PLC",
  "sector": "Banking and Payments",
  "outcome": "Upheld",
  "date": "15 Jun 2026",
  "summary": "The complaint Mr H complains that Barclays Bank UK PLC, trading as Barclaycard, incorrectly amended his email address which led to him no...",
  "pageCount": 3,
  "pdfUrl": "https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-6416620.pdf",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-10T13:07:57.049Z"
}

Download it from the run as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it straight from the API.

Sectors available

• Banking, credit and mortgages
• Investment and pensions
• Insurance, excluding PPI
• Payment protection insurance (PPI)
• Claims Management Ombudsman decisions
• Funeral plans

Scale and volume

The FOS database contains over 384,000 decisions published since April 2013, with new decisions added regularly. This Actor paginates automatically through results and can retrieve up to 500 decisions per run.

For monitoring, run it on a schedule, daily or weekly, with a narrow date range so you only pick up new decisions.

💰 How much does it cost?

Right now this Actor rents at $25 a month, which covers as many runs and as many decisions as you need.

From 21 August 2026 it moves to pay per result at $0.015 per decision. Most people run this occasionally rather than continuously, so the change makes it markedly cheaper for them, and you only pay for what a run actually returns. Set maxResults to cap what a run can cost, up to 500 per run.

Runs that return nothing cost nothing under the new pricing.

🔌 Integrations

Send results straight to Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable, Zapier, Make or your own webhook using Apify integrations. You can also trigger a run whenever something happens in another tool.

🔗 Using UK Financial Ombudsman Decisions with the Apify API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/spookyweb~uk-fos-decisions/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keyword": "motor finance commission", "sector": "banking-credit-mortgages", "outcome": "upheld", "maxResults": 50}'

Or with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('spookyweb/uk-fos-decisions').call({
  keyword: 'motor finance commission',
  sector: 'banking-credit-mortgages',
  outcome: 'upheld',
  maxResults: 50,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Full detail is in the Apify API reference, and every run is also callable from the Python and JavaScript clients.

❓ FAQ

How many decisions are there?

Over 384,000 published since April 2013, so roughly 400,000 in practice, with more added continually. A single run returns up to 500, so a large corpus is built from several runs split by date range, business or sector.

Can I filter to one business?

Yes, set businessName to the business as the FOS names it, for example Barclays or Revolut. Combine it with outcome to see only the complaints that were upheld against that firm.

What does uphold rate mean?

The FOS records each final decision as upheld or not upheld, meaning the ombudsman either agreed with the complainant or did not. An uphold rate is that ratio across a set of decisions, so filter to a business or sector, pull both outcomes, and count. The outcome field is the label you count on.

Is the full decision text available?

The full decision is a PDF, and pdfUrl links straight to it. The summary field carries the opening of the complaint description so you can triage without downloading anything, and pageCount tells you how long the full document is.

How current is it?

The Actor reads the live FOS database, so a run returns what is published at that moment. New decisions are added regularly. For monitoring, set a narrow dateFrom and schedule the run daily or weekly.

Are complainants named?

No. The FOS anonymises complainants before publication, which is why the summaries read "Mr H" rather than a full name. The business is named, because the ombudsman names it deliberately.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape Financial Ombudsman decisions?

The Financial Ombudsman Service publishes final decisions as a public record, under its transparency obligations in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. The businesses are named by the ombudsman, and complainants are already anonymised by the FOS before publication. This Actor reads only those published decisions, and it never logs in.

Data comes from the publicly accessible FOS decisions database. Apify's ethical scraping guide covers the wider picture.

👍 Your feedback

Found a bug, or want a field that is not here yet? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. Requests that make the data more useful get built, and problems get fixed quickly.

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