Complaints. Taken seriously.

At a glance.

The full procedure is detailed below. The summary version is one table.

How to make a complaint.

Three channels. Pick whichever is easiest.

What to include

The more we have on the first message, the faster the response. None of these are required, but each one removes a back-and-forth:

• Your merchant ID or the email address on your Fluxa account
• A description of what happened in your own words; we do not need legal language
• The date or dates on which the issue occurred
• The resolution you are looking for, whether that is a refund, a fix, a change in policy, an apology, or simply an explanation
• Supporting evidence: screenshots, transaction IDs, prior correspondence, anything that helps establish the timeline

Free of charge, always

Raising a complaint with Fluxa costs nothing. Escalating to the Financial Ombudsman Service or the Information Commissioner’s Office is also free for eligible complainants. You do not need a lawyer or a claims management company to make a complaint, and you should not be charged a fee by anyone for help with the standard process.

Accessibility and vulnerable customers

If you need this procedure or any of our correspondence in an alternative format (large print, plain text, structured email, telephone callback) or have any other accessibility need, tell us in the first message and we will make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010. If you are a vulnerable customer for any reason, including physical or mental health difficulties, life events such as bereavement or relationship breakdown, financial hardship, or limited English-language or digital capability, please tell us so we can agree on the right communication channel and pace. There is no penalty, in service or in tone, for asking for adjustments.

You do not need to use the word “complaint”, and you do not need to write in legal or technical language. If you tell any Fluxa channel that you are dissatisfied with something we have done or failed to do, we will treat it as a complaint and apply this procedure. This follows the FCA’s definition of a complaint in the DISP sourcebook.

No retaliation

Raising a complaint, whether resolved in your favour or not, will never affect your pricing, your service quality, the priority of your support tickets or the status of your account. This is a written commitment from the founders, monitored by the compliance lead.

What we cover.

Complaints sit in one of three categories, each with its own regulatory route. We will tell you which category a complaint falls under in the acknowledgement so the timelines and escalation rights are clear from the start.

Payment services complaints (regulated under PSR 2017)

Anything to do with the card processing itself, including transaction authorisation failures, settlement timing, account restrictions or freezes, fraud or chargeback disputes, refund processing, fees or rate application. These are regulated under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 and follow the 15-business-day timeline below. Final responses provide the right to refer the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Service complaints (non-regulated, handled under FCA DISP standards)

Anything to do with how Fluxa as a product behaves, including dashboard issues, integration support quality, documentation, onboarding experience, the speed or tone of our support, the migration tool, or anything else not directly part of the regulated payment service. These are not regulated payment services, but we apply the FCA Dispute Resolution sourcebook (DISP) 8-week timeline to them as a matter of policy.

Data protection complaints (UK GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018)

Anything to do with how Fluxa handles personal data, including collection, storage, third-party sharing, deletion, retention, or subject access requests. Handled under our Privacy Policy; if you are not satisfied with our response, the Information Commissioner’s Office is the statutory escalation route, contact details below.

What happens next.

Once you have raised a complaint, this is the sequence. Each step is something a person has to do; nothing here is automated for the sake of speed at the expense of getting it right.

1. Acknowledgement within one working day. Written confirmation that the complaint has been received, with a reference number and the named human who will own the case.
2. Categorisation. We classify the complaint as regulated payment service, service, or data protection so the correct timeline and escalation route apply. If a single complaint straddles categories, we will tell you and handle each strand explicitly.
3. Investigation by a named human. A senior member of the Fluxa team picks up the case directly: technical and product issues route to engineering; compliance, fees and account issues route to compliance. Not a ticket queue, not a rotating assignee. The same person owns the case from acknowledgement to final response.
4. Data gathered from logs. We pull every relevant trace from the API logs, the dashboard event stream, the ledger postings, the webhook records and any payments partner or scheme correspondence. The hash-chained audit trail means the timeline is reconstructable to the second.
5. Assessment of cause. Whether the cause sits with Fluxa, our payments partner, a card scheme or the issuing bank. Some complaints have shared causes; we identify each one explicitly and explain who did what.
6. Updates at every major step. Sent by email or via your dashboard ticket, whichever channel you used to raise the complaint. If we hit a delay we will tell you the reason in writing before the timeline expires, never after.
7. Final response in writing. Outcome, reasoning, any remedial action, and your onward rights including referral to the Financial Ombudsman Service where applicable. Plain English, no template apology.

Timelines.

Two regulatory regimes apply depending on whether the complaint is a regulated payment service or not. Both timelines are statutory maxima, not targets: we close most complaints well inside them.

The "business day" count starts on the day after we receive the complaint. UK bank holidays do not count. If you reply mid-investigation with new information, the original deadline still applies; we will not reset the clock against you.

Financial Ombudsman Service.

If you are unhappy with our final response, or if eight weeks pass without one on a regulated payment services complaint, you can refer the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service. The Ombudsman is free for eligible complainants, independent of Fluxa, and its decisions are binding on us within statutory limits.

Eligibility

Most UK consumers and micro-enterprises are eligible. Small and medium-sized businesses are also covered under the current FOS rules where they have an annual turnover below £6.5 million, fewer than 50 employees, and a balance sheet total below £5 million. Charities, trusts, guarantors and consumer buy-to-let landlords have their own eligibility thresholds. If you are not sure whether you qualify, the Ombudsman can confirm eligibility at intake; you do not need to work this out before getting in touch.

What the Ombudsman can do

The Ombudsman reviews the complaint independently, asks both sides for information, and makes a determination on whether we handled the matter fairly. Decisions can require Fluxa to compensate the complainant, change a position, or apologise. We will comply with any binding determination in full and within the timeframes the Ombudsman sets.

The maximum compensation the Ombudsman can require a firm to pay (from 1 April 2026) is £455,000 for complaints about acts or omissions on or after 1 April 2019, and £205,000 for acts or omissions before that date. The limits are adjusted annually by the FCA in line with the Consumer Prices Index.

Data protection complaints.

If your complaint is specifically about how Fluxa handles personal data, and you are not satisfied with our response, you can refer the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Filing with the ICO does not preclude you from raising the same matter with us; in most cases we will work with the ICO directly to investigate.

For background on how Fluxa collects, processes and protects personal data, the Privacy Policy sets out the lawful basis, retention periods and your rights as a data subject.

Root cause analysis.

Handling a complaint well is necessary. Fixing the underlying cause is what stops the next one. For every upheld complaint, the engineer or operator who owned the case writes an internal root-cause note within five working days of issuing the final response.

The note covers four things in writing: what went wrong, why it happened, what is changing to stop it recurring, and whether the change is a code fix, a process fix, a documentation fix or a contractual fix with a partner. The complaints lead reviews root-cause notes weekly. Patterns across complaints are reviewed quarterly and feed into product priorities documented in the changelog.

Where the underlying issue is product or infrastructure-related, the public security page or system status page is updated with the relevant detail. Where a fix is shipped, the changelog records it with a link back to the relevant root-cause category, with personal information redacted.

Records.

Every complaint is recorded in a dedicated complaints log with the date received, the category, the named owner, the dates of each substantive update, the final response date, the outcome, any remedy paid, and the root cause classification. Records are retained for at least three years from the date the complaint was received, in line with the FCA Dispute Resolution sourcebook (DISP 1.9). The log is reviewed weekly by the compliance lead and quarterly by the founders.

You can request a copy of our records relating to your own complaint at any time. We will provide it free of charge within one working day for an active complaint, or within five working days for a closed one. Where the records contain personal data, the subject access provisions of UK GDPR apply.

Our commitment.

Every complaint is logged, investigated and reviewed by a named human. We tell you what went wrong and what we are doing to fix it; if we got it wrong, we say so plainly. No template apologies, no escalation to a queue, no closing tickets without a written explanation.

We handle every complaint fairly, consistently and promptly, in line with the FCA’s Dispute Resolution sourcebook (DISP), the FCA Principles for Businesses (PRIN 6 and PRIN 7), and the Consumer Duty (PRIN 2A) where it applies. The standard is the same whether the complaint is large or small, written by a lawyer or written by hand.

• You get a named contact for the duration of the case, not a rotating ticket assignee
• You get a written final response with the decision, the reasoning, and your onward rights, in plain English
• You retain the right to refer to the Financial Ombudsman Service even if we offer or pay a settlement
• You will never be penalised in fees, service quality or account status for raising a complaint, whether upheld or not
• Aggregated complaints data is reviewed quarterly by the founders and the compliance lead; recurring patterns become product changes documented in the changelog
• If we make a fee, settlement or compensation offer to resolve a complaint, the offer will be in writing with the reasoning made clear; you will have time to consider it before accepting
• If we are wrong, we will say so. If we are right, we will explain why in enough detail for you to make an informed choice about whether to escalate

Reporting to the FCA.

Fluxa Ltd handles UK card processing as a Referrer to a payment service provider authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2017. Aggregate complaints data relating to regulated payment services is reported to the FCA at the cadence required by the Dispute Resolution sourcebook (DISP) and PSR 2017, including the Payment Services Complaints Return where applicable, via the authorised firm responsible for the regulated service.

Where Fluxa-attributable complaints volume crosses the FCA’s firm-level publication threshold, the aggregated figures will be visible on the FCA’s public complaints data publication. Until then, we publish our own internal complaints summary once a year on the changelog: total volume, share upheld, average time to resolution, top three root-cause categories and the product or process changes that followed.

Contact.

This procedure follows the FCA Dispute Resolution sourcebook (DISP) and the Payment Services Regulations 2017. We update this page whenever the underlying regulation changes or our process improves; the version date is recorded at the bottom of the page. Related documents: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Security, Acceptable use.