Right the second time

The Banco de España’s report on the complaints of 2025, published on 21 July, reads well for the banks at first. Complaints to the regulator fell by 45%, to 30,970, after a 2024 swollen by a Supreme Court ruling on mortgage costs. The banks’ own customer service departments handled 1,061,153 complaints and found against the customer in 58% of them. Most of those customers went no further.

The ones who did tell a different story. A customer can go to the regulator only after the bank has said no, or has not answered within a month. The Banco de España admitted 10,856 such complaints. In 3,585 of them the bank put matters right before the regulator had written its report. Of the 2,178 reports that found for the customer, the banks acted on 988. For the other 1,190, the regulator records no correction.

Taken together, in 4,573 cases, 42% of the complaints it admitted, a bank ended up correcting its position after first refusing the customer or leaving them waiting. Each of those cases cost the bank twice: once in the first answer, and again in the work of answering the regulator. Each also says something about the first decision. Either the first review missed something, or the bank was not prepared to defend what it had decided.

Neither is cheap to learn at the second stage. The regulator took 39 days on average to handle a complaint in 2025, on top of the month the bank had. Meanwhile the customer has written twice and waited twice.

The volume is rising again. In the first four months of 2026, complaints to the Banco de España rose by more than 50%, mainly over fraud. The regulator expects around 40,000 this year. Complaints about the banks’ complaint services themselves, mostly over delays and letters left unanswered, rose from 650 to 1,139 in 2025.

The rules have been rewritten, not loosened. Ley 10/2025, in force since 28 December 2025, recast the law on banks’ customer service departments. A complaint must be closed within a month, sooner for payment services, and a refusal must give its reasons and point the customer to the supervisor’s complaints service. Firms have until 28 December 2026 to adapt. What has not changed is that a Banco de España report does not bind: a bank may follow it or not, as it sees fit.

There is one place where all of this already has to be written down. Within the first quarter of each year, the customer service department must report to the board on the year before. At least a summary goes into the bank’s annual report. The rule comes from Orden ECO/734/2004, and it survived when much of that order was repealed last December. The next report is due by the end of March 2027.

A report that counts complaints by product and outcome tells the board how busy the department was. The more useful page lists the cases the bank later conceded, at the regulator’s door or after its report, and why the first answer did not hold. Much of that is already in writing, in the customer’s first letter: the charge they disputed, the call nobody returned, the fraud they reported on the day it happened. Grouped by reason, those letters show the board which first decisions to change.

A bank that changes them will concede fewer cases at the regulator, because it will already have conceded them at its own counter. Being right the second time is expensive. Being right the first time is what the department is for.