At the financial supervisory authority Bafin, complaints from bank customers are piling up. The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin) counted 14,760 cases last year, as the authority announced on request on Thursday. That was a good 19 percent more than in 2021 (12,383) and almost 60 percent more than in 2020 (9409). “The increase in complaints is mainly due to major IT changes at individual credit institutions and consumer protection-related court decisions,” Bafin said.
According to the information, bank customers complained mainly about increasing fees for account management and payment transactions (14 percent of complaints), because their account was blocked or even terminated (13 percent) or because they had problems with account management (6 percent). The judgment of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) on bank fees from April 2021 continues to cause trouble.
In contrast, the number of complaints about insurance companies in 2022 fell by a further eleven percent to 6166. The most common reasons for complaints here: the type and delay of the claims processing (28 percent) and the amount of the insurance benefit (13 percent).
The Bafin was reported with almost two-thirds fewer problems with securities transactions: after there had been an unusually large number of complaints about trading disruptions at online brokers a year earlier, the number of reports in this area fell from 6509 to 2404 within a year, and thus reached approximately again the level of 2020 (2325 complaints).
