Positive Solutions has reappeared in the Financial Ombudsman Service's (FOS) list of the top five most complained about advice firms.
The national IFA garnered 51 complaints in the period between 1 January and 30 June 2015. The ombudsman upheld 39% of the claims.
Businesses only appear in FOS data lists when they attract 30 new complaints in a six month period and when 30 complaints are resolved in the same timeframe.
Positive Solutions Financial Services, which last featured in the top five in the first half of 2014, was fifth in the top five most complained about advice businesses in the first half of this year.
Sesame topped the list with 172 complaints, up from 142 in the second half of last year. The uphold rate against the network was 27%, compared to 24% previously.
Second was restricted network Openwork with 111 complaints, against 82 in H2 2014. Its uphold rate was higher at 25% compared with 16% previously.
Interactive Investor Trading (IIT) and Hargreaves Lansdown Asset Management (HLAM) were grouped in the advisory category by the FOS and came third and fourth respectively.
IIT was complained about 75 times with an uphold rate of 63%. HLAM got 60 gripes of which 15% were upheld.
The average uphold rate across all financial services firms was 57% across the six month period. It ranged from 5% to 94% across individual businesses, the FOS said.
Overall, the organisation took on 8% more cases with almost 174,000 new cases in the first half of 2015.
PPI and packaged accounts
Some 55% of the new cases were linked to payment protection insurance (PPI). There were 94,091 new PPI complaints in the first half of the year, a 10% fall compared with the same period last year.
The rest of the complaints, 79,550 in total, were associated with other financial products. The FOS said the 45% rise was due to claims management companies bringing complaints about packaged bank accounts.
Some financial businesses feature in the complaints data for the first time, the organisation said.
Caroline Wayman, chief ombudsman at the FOS, said: "It's been seven years since the ombudsman first began to publish data about individual financial businesses. This has coincided with a period of volatility and challenge for much of the financial services sector - and this is still reflected in the data we publish today.
"Complaints about PPI continue to make up over half of our workload. And though the number of new PPI cases has reduced in the first half of this year, the decline has not been as steady or as marked as generally expected. This is at least in part due to the continued high levels of activity by claims managers in this area."
She added: "Claims managers have also been largely responsible for the substantial increase in complaints about packaged bank accounts, which have driven up our banking workload over this period by two-thirds.
"Nobody wants ‘another PPI'. This is why we're working closely with businesses, claims companies and their regulators, to make sure PPI is sorted as fairly and as quickly as possible for everyone involved - and that lessons are learned to prevent anything like this happening again. If we can all achieve this, then the next seven years should be a different story."
Further reading:
Sesame loses 60% of network advice firms in bid to survive
FCA splits advice from guidance in new complaints rules
Fall in protection complaints to FCA
