Change management specialist Marc Harris has joined the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) as its new chief operating officer.

He joins from Alpha Bank London where he was COO.

Before joining Alpha Bank, Mr Harris was interim head of COO office at Hargreaves Lansdown in 2022 where he helped establish a new COO function including establishing a transformation office and new business performance programmes.

He has also held transformation and digital-focused roles at several asset managers including Fidelity International, Octopus Investments and Close Brothers.

Abby Thomas, chief executive and chief ombudsman at the FOS, said Mr Harris will play a key role in “helping us deliver on the big ambitions we have for our service.”

He joined the ombudsman at the start of January and his key responsibilities are transformation and continuous improvement, planning, forecasting and performance, IT and data and analytics teams.

He takes over from Karl Khan who will leave the Financial Ombudsman at the end of this month. He joined the FOS in October 2022 from the UK Health Security Agency.

Mr Harris said he is excited to join the Ombudsman in a time of change.

He said: “I am excited and honoured to be joining the Financial Ombudsman Service, to have the opportunity to lead vital enabling functions and drive the ambitious transformation agenda, to support customers to get fair, timely and effective resolutions to complaints by delivering positive outcomes for the service.”

The FOS has been investing in technology and tools to reduce costs. according to its most recent report in December.

Machine learning or AI is being used to allocate cases quicker. Improved analytical capabilities have led to the FOS more than halving its case handling time since 2021/22. The median time to resolve a case for 2023/24 was 3.1 months, in comparison to 6.4 months in 2021/22.