Complaints

We strive to give you the best products and services. Unfortunately, we might not always get it right, and we're sorry for that. If you let us know what's happened, we can work harder to get it right next time.

How to make a complaint

The best way to contact us is by phone so that we can talk to you in person. Please call us on 0800 092 3300.

Please have your Personal Access Code (PAC) when you call us. If you don't have a PAC, or have forgotten it, please call us.

There are other ways to make a complaint:

If you're an existing customer you can fill out our online form.

Email: service@caterallen.co.uk

You can write to us:

Client Team
Cater Allen Private Bank
Cater Allen Operations
Sunderland
SR43 4FB

We want to fully understand what's gone wrong. We'll need some information to make sure the right person deals with your complaint in the best way.

Please include:

your name and address
your account details
a description of your complaint and how it's affected you
when the issue happened
your contact number, or your preferred method of contact
the best time to contact you.

This means we can contact you easily to talk about your problem. Calls from us may show as unknown or withheld numbers.

Using third party firm to make a complaint

If you use a third party to make your complaint, such as a solicitor, claims management company or financial adviser, we'll still investigate your issue in the same way to the best we can.

A few things to note:

we won't charge you to investigate your complaint
we aren't liable for any fees that a third party might charge you
if the result of the complaint includes a money award, we'll send that to you as our customer.

We'll do everything we can to resolve your concern. If we need more information to investigate, we'll contact you using the details we've listed above.

If we can resolve your complaint within 3 business days, we'll formally let you know, and tell you about the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).

For complex issues we may need more time to investigate your concerns. If this is the case, we'll send you an acknowledgment letter telling you the next steps.

Once we've done a detailed investigation, we'll give you a final response. This will tell you the details of what we did, how we reached our decision, and how we're going to improve.

We try to resolve all complaints as quickly as possible, and specific time frames apply to certain types of complaints:

Complaints relating to payments in or out of your account:

we'll let you know our final decision as soon as we've finished our investigation. We have 15 days to resolve these complaints
in exceptional circumstances it could take us longer than 15 days to investigate your complaint. But all complaints will be resolved in 35 days. We'll write to you to let you know if we need longer than 15 days. We'll also let you know how to refer the matter the Financial Ombudsman if you don't want to wait for us to finish investigating.

All other complaints:

although we have 56 days to resolve your complaint, we'll send you our final response as soon as we've completed our investigation
we'll also keep you informed in writing along the way
If we haven't been able to finalise our investigation by 56 days, we'll send you a letter to let you know. It'll tell you what steps to take. One option is to approach the Financial Ombudsman if you'd rather not wait for us to finalise our investigation.

If you don't agree with our resolution of your complaint and you'd like to take it further, you can ask the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to look into it. This is a free, independent, and impartial service that helps resolve disputes.

Although you can refer your complaint to the FOS at any time, they'll ask for our permission to investigate complaints where:

you haven't complained to us first, to give us the chance to put things right
You have complained to us, but we haven't given you our final response yet and we're still -within our timescales.

We'll send you the full details of our final response decision, including your right to refer your complaint to the FOS. If you do that, it should be within 6 months of the date on our final response.

Web: www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk
Email: complaint.info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk
Phone: 0800 0 234 567 (free from UK landlines and mobiles)
Post: Financial Ombudsman Service, Exchange Tower, London E14 9SR

Continually improving the service we offer and reducing the number of complaints we get is so important to us. We regularly look at our complaints data, which helps us to understand how we can improve.

Complaints data

Every 6 months we publish the number of customer complaints we've received for that period. We also categorise them into types of complaints.

Why we publish

The FCA need us to give this information directly to them as well as on our own website. This information will be used to tell them how we are doing in terms of service.

Firm Name	Cater Allen Limited
Group (if Applicable)
Other firms included in this report (if any)
Period covered in this report	01 January 2024 - 30 June 2024
Brands/Trading names covered	Cater Allen

Cater Allen received fewer than 500 complaints during H1 2024

Firm Name	Cater Allen Limited
Group (if Applicable)
Other firms included in this report (if any)
Period covered in this report	01 July 2023 - 31 December 2023
Brands/Trading names covered	Cater Allen

Number of complaints opened by volume of business.

Product / Service Group	Provision (at reporting period end date)	Inter-mediation (within the reporting period)	No. of complaints opened	No. of complaints closed	Percentage closed within 3 days	Percentage closed after 3 days but within 8 weeks	Percentage upheld	Main cause of complaints opened
Banking & Credit Cards	5.6 per 1000 accounts	N/A	524	649	30%	57%	64%	other general admin / customer service

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) publishes company complaints figures and provides analysis on the recent industry complaint data. From June 2016 the FCA made some changes to how firms should handle and report complaints. You can find more information about the changes here.

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) also publishes information about how many complaints they receive, and the results. They also provide guidance to companies on how to handle complaints.

To see results for other financial providers, please visit their website.

Find out more information at Service Quality Information page.

Complaints

Ways to contact us

What we need from you

Using third party firm to make a complaint

What happens next?

Timescales

Complaints relating to payments in or out of your account:

All other complaints:

The Financial Ombudsman Service

What we publish

Why we publish

Latest results

Previous results

Number of complaints opened by volume of business.

Industry data

Service quality metrics