More than 7m people unsuccessfully attempted to contact one or more of their financial services providers in the 12 months up to May 2022, according to the Financial Conduct Authority.

The regulator said the most vulnerable in society were the most likely to have struggled to contact financial firms. 

The figure comes from the FCA’s latest consumer-focused Financial Lives survey which had more than 19,000 respondents.

The survey found that one in seven (14%) adults who held one or more financial products – or 7.4 million people – had unsuccessfully attempted to contact one or more of their financial services providers in the 12 months to May last year.

Meanwhile, an estimated 3.6 million people (7%) were able to contact one of their financial services providers but could not get the information or support they wanted.

The report said: “Many of the problems experienced by consumers relate to customer services, such as poor customer service, IT system failures or service disruption, sales pressure, (the) provider making errors or not following instructions, delays when making changes to an account or when arranging an account, or having unsuitable channels to contact the provider.”

The survey showed that adults with one or more characteristics of vulnerability were more likely to report that customer support services did not help them at all to achieve what they wanted to do.

For example, 20% of those with low financial resilience and 20% of those with low capability reported that provider communications did not help at all, compared with 12% of those with no characteristics of vulnerability.

Consequently, less than half of UK adults, or 21.9 million people, had confidence in the UK financial services industry and just 36% agreed that most financial firms were honest and transparent in the way they treated them.

A more positive picture emerged when people were asked to rate their own provider, rather than the sector in general. 

The findings come ahead of the introduction of the Consumer Duty next Tuesday 31 July.

Sheldon Mills, executive director, consumers and competition at the FCA said: “Times like this show why it’s important people get the support they need as more people are likely turning to their financial services providers for help. 

“Our Consumer Duty will guide our ongoing work to improve the way firms provide customer support - getting through to your provider is the starting point for receiving help, so we will be working with them to improve in this area.” 

Under the Duty, firms will have to: 

• Provide helpful and responsive customer service – for example, it should be as easy to complain about or switch and cancel products or services as it was to buy them 
• Equip their customers to make good decisions through communications people can understand, provided at the right time 
• Provide products and services that meet consumers’ needs and work as expected  
• Explain and justify their pricing decisions. This includes being able to demonstrate that rates offer fair value.

Last week the FCA said the number of people struggling to meet bills and credit repayments has risen by 3.1m since May 2022 (10.9m, compared to 7.8m in May 2022). 

The number of adults who missed bills or loan payments in at least three of the last six months has also risen by 1.4m, from 4.2m to 5.6m over the same period.