Listen and learn, banks told, as rejected PPI cases hit 1m She said: "Last year the regulator reported that over five million "complaints" were made about financial businesses. That's five million comments and observations on the service provided by banks and other financial businesses. This feedback could inform new ways of working, new products, better services, and a new relationship with customers. But too often, that doesn't happen. These customers" feedback gets subsumed by a complaints infrastructure that's slow [and] bureaucratic. Study after study shows that customers are more loyal if something that's gone wrong gets fixed, than if they had never had a problem in the first place. If we listen carefully to what they're saying, those customers written off as "complainants" might just be the key to matching marketing aspirations with customer reality." A total of 247,399 PPI complaints were recorded by the ombudsman between April and September this year, made up of around 132,000 cases between April and June and 115,000 between July and September. Banks have set aside more than £18bn to cover the cost of the PPI scandal, which saw borrowers sold cover they did not need or could not use.