Complaint

A regulated process rather than a customer service courtesy. Under an authorisation a firm has to operate a published complaints procedure, acknowledge a complaint, investigate it, and issue a final response inside a stated period. The final response is the document that matters, because it states the firm's position and it is the thing an external body reads. A firm is also obliged to tell the complainant where to take the matter next, and to name that body.

Escalation beyond the firm goes to whatever body the regime provides, which receives the complaint together with the firm's file. Its powers are concrete and limited. It can require the firm to produce records, it can find that a rule was breached, and where the regime allows it can direct that an identified error is put right. It can also refer conduct to the regulator, which may attach conditions to a permission or restrict it. What it cannot do is reverse a market outcome or compensate a decision that was simply unprofitable.

The distinction that decides most cases is documentary. A complaint resting on the audit trail, that a charge did not match the terms, that an instruction was not handled as the execution policy describes, that a record is missing, is answerable from records both sides hold. A complaint resting on what a reader believes was implied usually is not, and the boundary of regulation is where it stops.