CFPB Complaint Database by the Numbers: Prepaid-Related Complaints Make up Less than a Quarter of 1 Percent of Total
Consumers may be complaining about financial services in general, but those complaining to the CFPB about prepaid make up about 0.19 percent of the 411,434 complaints in the agency’s Consumer Complaint Database. The CFPB last week went live with an enhanced complaint database, which, for the first time, included consumer narratives explaining their problems with financial products and services. As of last week, approximately 7,700 consumers had opted in to make public their narratives, which are scrubbed of personal information. Only 796 (0.19 percent) complaints in the database are prepaid-related, and only 55 consumers opted to disclose their stories related to problems with prepaid products and services.
By comparison, complaints pertaining to mortgages and debt collection are the most common, with 150,708 (36.63 percent) and 69,429 (16.87 percent) complaints, respectively. Bank accounts or services—checking and savings—had 47,413 complaints. The only product with fewer complaints than prepaid was “other” at 234. See snapshot of the categories above.
The bureau also is seeking input, through an official request for information, on ways to make the data more useful to the public. Specifically, the CFPB is looking for ideas to enable the public to more easily understand information in the database as well as add more context to the complaint data. The RFI, along with the deadline and ways to submit information, can be found here.
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