The Financial Ombudsman Service has implemented all the key recommendations of its most recent independent review.The FOS board issued a statement on Friday, saying the review recommendations that were accepted by the board have all been addressed.FOS chairman Michael Lavarch said: "The changes made at FOS over the past two years are now delivering improved dispute resolution for consumers, particularly in reducing the time taken to resolve disputes."The review by consultant Cameronralph Navigator, which was released in March last year, said FOS's organisational model had passed its use-by date and needed a complete overhaul.The key issue was that the ombudsman did not meet its benchmark for efficiency because of undue delay in dealing with disputes.The review said: "The primary issue identified by our analysis is the configuration of FOS into a series of 'production line' steps, each focusing on a particular dispute resolution technique. This is designed to progressively filter out the less complex disputes and to resolve as many disputes as possible by co-operative means, reserving the effort of the most experienced and senior staff for the most complex and most contested disputes at the end of production line."The downside of this configuration is multiple hand-offs between FOS staff, queuing of disputes between internal stages, delays in achieving a FOS view on the merits of disputes and some frustration for the parties."Cameronralph Navigator said that, without substantial structural and process change, further incremental improvements were unlikely to be of the scale that stakeholders expected."The next era for FOS requires a move to smaller, vertically integrated and more flexible teams," it said.In response, FOS eliminated a significant backlog in case management by the end of 2014 and across all dispute areas by June 2015.In July this year FOS kicked off a new dispute handing process, aiming to fast-track more disputes and give financial services providers more opportunity to resolve disputes before the ombudsman gets involved.FOS said it would bring people with specialist expertise into the dispute process earlier and streamline its approach to handling cases involving financial difficulty.Financial services providers will, in most cases, deal with a single FOS staff member on a dispute. FOS has undertaken that document exchange will be timely.Lavarch said: "While it is still early days, FOS is already seeing the benefits of more active engagement with applicants and financial services providers much earlier in the dispute process, fewer FOS touchpoints, and the ability to apply FOS expertise right from the start of its involvement with applicants and financial services providers."