The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has seen the number of complaints about payment protection service (PPI) drop critically.

In the third quarter of this year, FOS received 19,259 new PPI complaints; 60% less than the second quarter.

FOS said that they had expected the drop in PPI cases after the backlog had cleared.

 The firm said it was upholding more PPI cases than ever before.

A FOS spokesman said: “The percentage of PPI complaints we upheld in favour of the consumer increased to 92%”.

This has increased significantly from the last figures that it posted where the uphold rate was 47%.

In the financial year 2010-2011, the number of PPI cases to FOS doubled to nearly 105,000 and publicity spread awareness about the mis-selling of PPI, gaining more cases.

During this financial year, a High Court case the banks fought a High Court case in which they challenged the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the FOS about how PPI cases should be taken care of and how PPI should be sold.

While the judicial review was taking place, the banks put all their new PPI cases on hold, resulting in a build-up of more than 200,000 cases.

From April, the number of people complaining to the FOS soared up to just over 56,000.

Currently, new PPI cases still make up 38% of the FOS’ workload, despite the fact that the surge of new cases has peaked.

“Complaints about current accounts and credit cards also remain high,” said the FOS.