The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has announced the next phase in a series of reforms that aim to streamline and modernise the complaints process. It says this will provide a foundation for proposed legislative changes to the ‘fair and reasonable’ remit which are currently progressing through Parliament. In addition, it will introduce new powers to dismiss complaints that are not appropriate for the Financial Ombudsman and may be better resolved – or are already being investigated – in other ways. It says by doing this, it will ensure that complaints referred to the service are within its scope and ready to be investigated before being allocated to a caseworker. This will continue the service’s work to provide a fairer funding model to better reflect costs and support earlier resolution of disputes.