CFPB Adds New Capabilities to Consumer Complaint Database

Last month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced a new trends view on its Consumer Complaint Database, which allows consumers to see information on complaints over time with additional ways to filter and view query results.

“These powerful new capabilities allow users to gain deeper insight into changes in the location, type, and volume of complaints over time, which provides valuable context into consumers’ experiences in the financial marketplace,” said CFPB Director Kathleen L. Kraninger. “I’m excited to make these additional tools available to the public as I promised last year.”

The original database allowed users to filter complaints by product, issue, date, and company name, as well as allowing consumers to search complaints for keywords.

With the updates to the database, the trends view and the new map view build on the original system, emphasize aggregation and information analysis, and make it easier to inspect underlying data more closely. With the enhancements, users can aggregate complaints by many categories, including issues and products.

Users can also see complaints over time to better understand trends, as well as clarify visuals based on the criteria they select.

The CFPB made other improvements in the past, including the integration of financial information into the complaint process and the modification of disclaimers to provide clearer context to published data. It has handled more than 2.3 million complaints, to which more than 5,000 companies have responded. In total, timely answers have been provided in response to 97 percent of nearly 1.7 million complaints.

Click here to access the Consumer Complaint Database.