UK investment platforms’ complaint uphold rates ranged from 2% to 51% in the same half-year

The Financial Conduct Authority’s firm-level complaints table shows a 48.33-percentage-point gap in investment-complaint uphold rates among five large UK platforms in the first half of 2026. Interactive Investor upheld 50.59% of closed investment complaints, while eToro UK upheld 2.26%. Hargreaves Lansdown reported 43.01%, Freetrade 41.41% and Trading 212 6.71%. The highest rate was 22.4 times the lowest.[1]

That range is too large to ignore and too easy to misinterpret. An uphold rate is not a league table of misconduct. It depends on what customers complained about, how firms categorised cases, the mix of products and service events, the maturity of each complaint, and the threshold at which a business accepts fault or offers redress. The figures do establish that consumers received dramatically different outcomes across firms reporting into the same regulatory dataset and product grouping.[1][2]

The five-platform comparison

Interactive Investor recorded 4,069 investment complaints opened and 3,451 closed, with 50.59% upheld. Hargreaves Lansdown recorded 8,328 opened and 7,147 closed, with 43.01% upheld. Trading 212 recorded 2,251 opened and 2,160 closed, with 6.71% upheld. eToro UK recorded 631 opened and 620 closed, with 2.26% upheld. Freetrade recorded 489 opened and 384 closed, with 41.41% upheld.[1]

The FCA publishes firms that meet its reporting threshold: generally 500 or more complaints in a six-month period or 1,000 or more in a year, with the table also carrying the relevant product and outcome fields. Freetrade’s investment-category row was below 500 opened complaints, but the firm can still appear because publication eligibility is assessed across the firm’s reportable complaints rather than by requiring every displayed product row to exceed the threshold.[1][2]

The arithmetic behind the range is simple. Subtracting eToro’s 2.26% from Interactive Investor’s 50.59% gives 48.33 percentage points. Dividing 50.59 by 2.26 gives 22.38. Trading 212’s rate was 43.88 points below Interactive Investor’s. These are like-for-like in period and FCA product label, but not necessarily like-for-like in complaint substance.[1]

Speed varied almost as much as outcomes

The table also records how quickly complaints were closed. Trading 212 closed 71.90% within three days. eToro reported 65.32%. Hargreaves Lansdown reported 23.41%, Interactive Investor 9.30% and Freetrade 1.30%. The gap between Trading 212 and Freetrade was 70.60 percentage points.[1]

Most of Freetrade’s complaints—96.61%—were closed after three days but within eight weeks. Hargreaves Lansdown reported 75.53% in that window, Interactive Investor 70.99%, eToro 34.35% and Trading 212 28.10%. The percentages should not be added casually when small residual categories or cases beyond eight weeks are present, but the pattern is clear: some firms resolved most cases immediately, while others used the formal investigation window for most complaints.[1]

Fast closure can mean efficient correction, a simple answer, duplicate or ineligible complaints, or rapid rejection. Slow closure can reflect complexity, documentation, third-party dependencies or weaker processes. The table does not connect each closure-time bucket with whether the complaint was upheld. A platform could close many simple cases quickly and uphold few, while spending longer on complex cases that eventually produce redress. Without that cross-tabulation, speed and fairness cannot be inferred from one another.[1][2]

Why uphold rates can diverge

Product mix is an obvious candidate. The FCA’s investment category can contain complaints about execution, transfers, platform availability, corporate actions, fees, communications, suitability where relevant, tax wrappers and administration. A leveraged-trading platform, an execution-only share app and a full-service investment supermarket can all appear in the same broad category while exposing customers to different processes and failure points.[1][2]

Customer and account maturity also matter. A platform migrating a large legacy book can receive transfer and service complaints unlike those at a newer app. A firm launching products may experience onboarding or operational issues. Market events can generate complaints about outages and execution at one business while another receives pension, ISA or corporate-action cases that require more investigation. The FCA table supplies the outcome rate but not the case taxonomy needed to normalise those differences.[1][2]

Policy can create a further gap. Firms may interpret the same facts differently, use different internal evidence thresholds or decide to make goodwill payments without formally upholding a complaint. A low uphold rate could reflect fewer valid complaints, or it could reflect a stricter approach that later produces Financial Ombudsman reversals. A high rate could reflect genuine service failures, or a policy of accepting and correcting problems early. The table alone cannot distinguish those explanations.[2]

Volume and outcome answer different questions

Hargreaves Lansdown had by far the largest investment-complaint volume in this group, with 8,328 opened. That is more than 13 times eToro’s 631. Yet raw volume must be related to a relevant customer or account denominator before it can describe complaint incidence. The FCA table does not place every firm on a uniform active-customer, funded-account or transaction-volume base. Dividing complaints by a marketing user count would be especially unreliable if the definitions differ.[1][2]

The uphold percentage answers a different question: among complaints closed under the reported framework, what share did the firm uphold? It does not show how likely an average customer was to complain. A firm can have a high uphold rate on a small number of complaints or a low rate on a large number. A complete consumer comparison needs both incidence and treatment: complaints per comparable active account, closure time, uphold rate, redress paid and Ombudsman outcomes.[1][2]

The public-interest finding

The public-interest issue is not that one percentage proves one platform is good or bad. It is that customers approaching similar-looking investment services face materially different complaint pathways, and the public table does not explain why. A consumer seeing a 2.26% uphold rate at one firm and 50.59% at another cannot tell whether the gap reflects case quality, product mix, internal standards or dispute strategy.[1]

That uncertainty is consequential because internal complaint handling is the first formal opportunity to correct a financial-service failure. It determines whether a customer receives an explanation or redress without escalating to the Ombudsman. Persistent differences can also affect regulatory supervision: unusually low or high rates may prompt questions about categorisation, root-cause analysis and whether firms are learning from cases.[2]

The next evidence needed is firm-specific. Each platform should disclose the leading investment-complaint causes, the share resolved with payment or non-financial remedy, the number escalated to the Financial Ombudsman, the proportion changed or overturned there, and any exceptional event affecting the half-year. A consistent active-account denominator would allow complaint incidence to be separated from complaint handling.[1][2]

What the FCA data prove

The table proves that reported outcomes differed sharply in the same six-month period. Interactive Investor upheld roughly half of its closed investment complaints; Hargreaves Lansdown and Freetrade upheld around two-fifths; Trading 212 upheld 6.71%; and eToro upheld 2.26%. Closure speed also ranged from 1.30% to 71.90% within three days. Those are official firm-level disclosures, not survey estimates.[1]

It does not prove that the firm with the lowest rate rejected valid claims or that the firm with the highest rate delivered the worst underlying service. Those conclusions require case-level and denominator evidence that the table does not contain. The defensible investigative finding is the unexplained spread itself: a 48.33-point outcome gap and a 70.60-point speed gap across platforms occupying the same regulated consumer market. That is large enough to demand explanation rather than casual ranking.[1][2]

A proper comparison would need the complaint taxonomy beneath the percentages. Platform outages, transfer delays, investment performance disputes, fraud claims and communication failures can have very different uphold probabilities and resolution times. Firms may also differ in when they classify a contact as a complaint and when they close it. The FCA table creates a common reporting frame but not a common case mix. Publishing complaint counts by issue, product, customer base and redress amount would allow the 2%–51% range to be interpreted as service performance, policy difference or portfolio composition rather than left as an unexplained firm-level outcome.[1][2]

Until those denominators are published, the gap is a transparency finding rather than a verdict on which platform treats customers best.[1][2]

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