Annual Review 2023-24
Contents
- About this Annual Review
- Year at a glance
- Board Chair message
- Chief Executive Officer and Chief Ombudsman message
- Organisational overview
- Complaints
- Who complained to AFCA in 2023–24?
- AFCA Engagement with First Nations peoples
- Overview of complaints
- Open cases
- Closed cases
- Banking and finance complaints
- Buy now pay later
- Scam complaints
- Financial difficulty complaints
- Small business complaints
- General insurance complaints
- Significant events
- Life insurance complaints
- Superannuation complaints
- Investments and advice complaints
- Cryptocurrency
- Complaints lodged by consumer advocates and financial counsellors
- Complaints outside AFCA’s Rules
- Systemic issues
- AFCA’s Code compliance and monitoring function
- Engagement, awareness and accessibility
- Corporate information
- AFCA General Purpose Financial Report
- Glossary
AFCA experienced another record year in 2023-24, with complaints rising 8% to 104,861. We resolved 104,203 complaints, 21% more than in 2022-23. Complainants secured $313,903,256 million in compensation and refunds.
Despite a less dramatic increase than the previous year’s 34% surge, we are still very concerned about the continued high numbers of complaints coming to AFCA.
Complaints are particularly high in banking and finance where they rose 12% to 60,076. For the second year in a row, there were more complaints about personal transactions (16%) than credit cards (11%). This was largely driven by scam related complaints which grew 81% to 10,928.
With higher interest rates and increased costs of living pressure, complaints involving financial difficulty rose 18% to 5,715 in 2023-24. Home loan complaints accounted for one in three of those complaints (1,887).
As even more consumers turned to alternative forms of credit, buy now pay later (BNPL) complaints rose 16%.
General insurance complaints rose 5% from 27,924 to 29,335 – much less than the 50% increase between FY22 and FY23, but total numbers remain extremely high. Delays in claim handling were again the largest source of complaints (25%) albeit that there was a slight reduction of 6% from 2022-23.
AFCA’s services should be reserved for intractable disputes that cannot be resolved between the parties, rather than us handling high volumes of issues around delay and poor service, which financial firms should be resolving themselves.
Complaints received
Complaints received by product line
Top five complaints received by product and number of complaints
|
Product |
2019-20 |
2020-21 |
2021-22 |
2022-23 |
2023-24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Personal transaction accounts |
3,815 |
5,758 |
7,416 |
13,781 |
16,551 |
|
Credit cards |
11,628 |
9,903 |
9,153 |
10,555 |
11,913 |
|
Motor vehicle – comprehensive |
4,104 |
4,386 |
5,791 |
8,296 |
10,204 |
|
Personal loans |
5,722 |
5,343 |
5,679 |
6,524 |
7,737 |
|
Home building |
3,616 |
3,527 |
6,120 |
9,592 |
7,358 |
Top five complaints received by issue and number of complaints
|
Issue |
2019-20 |
2020-21 |
2021-22 |
2022-23 |
2023-24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Unauthorised transactions |
5,081 |
5,048 |
6,398 |
10,840 |
12,696 |
|
Delay in claim handling |
5,169 |
4,773 |
6,259 |
10,996 |
10,156 |
|
Claim amount |
3,774 |
3,693 |
4,419 |
6,266 |
6,193 |
|
Service quality |
5,685 |
6,880 |
8,744 |
8,374 |
6,062 |
|
Other type of scam¹ |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5,906 |
¹ This is a new complaint category. It includes other financial scams which do not form part of unauthorised transactions figures where many scam cases are seen.
