Hello everyone, This is my first post, so please excuse any mistakes I may make. I am sure there have been other threads with similar questions to my own, but I am not sure how to find them, so I hope you will bear with me on this matter. My wife and I have recently received the final decision on a complaint brought against HSBC. The complaint revolved around the fact that HSBC advised us to repay a personal loan early with a lump sum of £7146, as this would be of greater benefit to us than investing the money elsewhere. However, HSBC failed to inform us that a "cashback" sum of £640, payable if the loan were to run to it's full term, would be lost, instead wrongly stating that the amount was only £256. After complaining to HSBC and failing to resolve the matter, a complaint was made to the FOS. Initially, the adjudicator tried to reject our complaint showing an alarming lack of competence and complete lack of understanding of financial matters, but on appeal the ombudsman at least agreed in principle with our argument, that we had suffered financially by following HSBC's advice. However, he too made incorrect assumptions and proposed an award of just a fraction of our losses, so I had to write yet again, explaining his errors. His response was to accept the basis of our argument, but not the detail, this time ruling that the award should be under half of our stated loss. We have stated from the outset that the lump sum would have been placed in a 3 year 4% p.a.fixed rate isa with Aldermore bank, of which we learned just a few days after repaying the loan and discovering that HSBC had misadvised us. However, the ombudsman has been obsessed with using a theoretical average interest rate of 2% p.a. which he states would be taxable. Even if he refuses to accept our claim regarding the interest rate, he was aware that the money involved was held in an isa and it is inconceivable that we would have put it in an account where the interest is taxable, when there were numerous isa's paying tax-free interest, with rates far better than the 2% he claims. The outcome has been an award which leaves us around £230 worse off, which I know, having read some of the dreadful tales on this website, is far below the losses incurred by some people, but it is nonetheless significant to us, as it represents around a week's take home pay to me. The ombudsman also made an award of £50 for "distress and inconvenience", but even this is about the minimum he could apply and appears to have been made just for appearances sake. It is clear from our experience that the ombudsman has awarded the least he can get away with, in the face of the insurmountable evidence we provided and so has kept the cost to HSBC to an absolute minimum, while the FOS pockets a nice fat fee of £500 for doing a very poor job for the consumer. We cannot challenge the decision and have had no choice but to accept it. I can see little benefit in complaining to the FOS, as I am sure they will close ranks and deny any wrongdoing, if they reply at all. I know that the Independent Assessor is of no use in complaints regarding ombudsman decisions (or anything else, reading other posts and articles), so I would very much appreciate any advice regarding who I could inform regarding the ombudsman's failure to provide an unbiased and impartial ruling. I apologise if this post seems overly long, but I have tried to only include the necessary relevant information, to enable my complaint to be understood, Many thanks, Peter.