Keep calm and transform: Leveraging talent, technology and in-depth expertise to reduce Britain’s £100bn annual complaints black hole

If you feel like recent events across the Atlantic and around the world are happening extremely quickly and stand to fundamentally transform and disrupt our way of life – it’s because they are.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UK Finance or its members.

What’s needed is pragmatic, goal-oriented and sensible collaboration between the public, business and the public sector to tackle some of our most serious challenges creatively, with determination and at pace.

The resolution of consumer disputes is one of these great challenges and costs UK Plc nearly £100bn per year in lost productivity, according to the Institute of Customer Service. The 2025 UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKSCI) highlights the scale of this issue, finding that 64 per cent of full-time employees spend part of their time dealing with service failures: averaging 4 days per month. This translates to nearly £100 billion in lost productivity annually. While AI may not be able to plug this hole completely, it can make the efficiency of complaints resolution less costly, reduce the cost of errors, and prevent common problems from recurring.

Businesses with effective, high-quality and consistent complaints processes therefore don’t only stand to save a lot of money – they are able to leverage the rich insights of complaints data to identify and remediate root causes of customer frustration across the board, leading to higher customer retention, national and global competitiveness, and profitability.

As a result Banks, FinTechs, Asset & Wealth Managers and Insurers stand to benefit hugely from recent advances in artificial intelligence, which enable the positive transformation of the complaints function to drive efficiency, quality and root cause analysis. Our pioneering projects from within the financial services sector show that:

  • Through real-world applications we have seen that AI in complaints handling can reduce administrative burdens by over 70 per cent, with over 90 per cent accuracy identifying customer vulnerabilities, case outcomes, and root causes. AI technologies lift both the productivity and the quality of complaints teams simultaneously. From generating draft response letters to summarising call recordings and detecting customer vulnerabilities, AI is already transforming complaints handling by improving efficiency, customer satisfaction, and risk management. By reducing manual intervention and accelerating resolution times, AI also helps businesses control costs and enhance profitability. Businesses that adopt AI in complaints resolution therefore don’t just tackle a significant cost and risk centre directly, they also lay the foundation for expansion to similar use cases across their operations.
  • The best technology will be developed and delivered by specialist AI companies with in-depth sector expertise. While large American technology companies will continue to provide the foundational technological infrastructure, only specialist AI companies with significant operational, regulatory, and security expertise directly applicable to the concrete problem statement will deliver solutions that work safely at scale with minimal error rates. At CourtCorrect, we embody this approach by bringing together a team of AI experts (Cambridge, Cohere) with operational and regulatory experts in financial services (HSBC, KPMG).
  • In order to solve systemic problems, systems and data across the market need to be standardised and integrated. We need an end-to-end data structure for a complaint file and API-based protocols to securely share this data with the relevant parties as the complaint progresses. The standardisation and integration of data across systems will also help firms identify new trends, like new types of fraud, more easily and faster at an early stage. Efforts to develop a common data structure for consumer disputes are gaining momentum, with research collaborations playing a key role. Our research collaboration with the University of Cambridge is one such initiative, which aims to advance standardisation and integration of disputes data.
  • What works in financial services will work in TelCo, Energy – and around the world. This evolution in consumer dispute resolution will ultimately expand to other sectors and jurisdictions. UK financial services firms and regulators have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead the way, enhancing the competitiveness of UK businesses and reaffirming the UK’s global leadership in responsible financial services innovation.

These ideas are not meant as recommendations or even predictions. They are simply a call to action. The combination of Britain’s intellectual capital, creativity and public–private partnership to drive positive transformation and innovation in complaints resolution with technology will result in a win-win-win for consumers, business, regulators and save UK Plc up to £100bn every year in the process.

At CourtCorrect, we’re already working on it. How about you?