Pakistani banks returned Rs1.2 billion to customers in the first nine months of 2026 following complaints handled by the Banking Ombudsman. The office received 33,625 complaints over the period and resolved 29,001 of them.
Sirajuddin Aziz, who holds the office, released the figures alongside an appeal to customers to guard against financial fraud. The pairing is not incidental — it points at where a large share of the caseload is now coming from.
The numbers, and what they imply
- Recovered and returned to customers: Rs1.2 billion
- Complaints received, January to September 2026: 33,625
- Complaints resolved: 29,001
- Resolution rate: 86.2 percent
- Complaints routed through the Prime Minister’s Portal: 5,927
- Average recovery per resolved complaint: about Rs41,400
An 86 percent resolution rate is a strong operational number for a dispute body. The 4,624 complaints not resolved are the ones worth asking about — whether they are still in process, were withdrawn, or were decided against the complainant has not been broken out, and those are three very different outcomes.
The average recovery of roughly Rs41,400 describes the character of the caseload better than the Rs1.2 billion headline does. This is retail banking at ordinary scale — wrong charges, failed transfers, disputed debits — rather than a small number of large disputes. For most complainants the sum at stake is meaningful precisely because it is not large.
A fifth of complaints arrive by the wrong door
Of the 33,625 complaints, 5,927 — 17.6 percent — came through the Prime Minister’s Portal rather than directly to the Ombudsman.
That figure reads two ways. Charitably, it shows the government’s general grievance channel working as intended, routing people to the right specialist body. Less charitably, it suggests that roughly one in six aggrieved bank customers does not know a dedicated banking ombudsman exists, and reaches for the generic complaints portal instead.
Either reading points to the same remedy. The obligation to tell customers where to complain sits with banks, and a visible referral at the point of a rejected branch-level complaint would move those cases directly.
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A partial comparison with earlier in the year
A report in late July put the amount banks had refunded at Rs763 million. If that figure rested on the same calendar-year basis, roughly Rs437 million has been recovered in the months since.
That conditional matters and we are not able to resolve it. The periods covered by the two announcements were not stated in identical terms, and a comparison between a part-year figure and a nine-month figure is only valid if both run from the same start date. Read as an indication rather than a measurement, the pace of recovery appears to have held rather than accelerated.
The fraud advice, and the question it leaves open
Aziz urged customers not to share sensitive details with third parties, not to click links from unknown sources, to call their bank’s own helpline about suspicious calls, and to report suspicious numbers to the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency.
All of it is sound. All of it also places the burden of defence on the customer, and that is the part of the framework currently unsettled in Pakistan. When a customer is deceived into authorising a payment — rather than having an account breached — the loss falls on the customer under most readings, because the instruction was genuinely given.
Several jurisdictions have moved away from that position on the reasoning that banks are better placed than individuals to detect anomalous payment patterns, and have shifted part of the liability onto the institutions. Pakistan has not had that debate publicly, and no breakdown of how many of the 33,625 complaints involved fraud has been published — which is the figure that would show how large the question is.
Where the office sits in the chain
The Banking Ombudsman is not a first port of call. A customer is expected to complain to the bank first and approach the office only if the bank fails to resolve the matter or does not reply within the stipulated period.
That sequencing means every one of the 33,625 complaints represents a case a bank had already seen and not settled. Read that way, the figure is less a measure of how many things go wrong in Pakistani banking than of how many go wrong and are then handled badly enough that the customer escalates.
It also explains the recovery rate. If a complaint has survived the bank’s own review and an independent body still finds for the customer in the great majority of cases, the implication is about the quality of internal complaint handling rather than about the complexity of the disputes. That is a supervisory question for the State Bank as much as a casework question for the Ombudsman.
What the office does not publish
The release gives totals without composition. There is no breakdown by complaint category, no comparison with 2025, and no bank-level data showing which institutions generate complaints disproportionately to their customer base.
That last omission is the consequential one. A dispute body’s aggregate numbers measure its own throughput; bank-level numbers would create a competitive incentive to generate fewer complaints in the first place. Regulators elsewhere publish exactly that, and the deterrent effect comes from the comparison rather than from the total.
Rs1.2 billion returned is a real result for the people who got their money back. Whether the banking system is improving or merely being policed more efficiently is a different question, and this release does not contain the data to answer it.
