There’s big news this week over at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: on the same day the agency announced several staffing changes—including the appointment of new general counsel Meredith Fuchs—the CFPB also launched the Consumer Response Database, a searchable and publicly available portal that lists the names of companies about whom consumers have complained.
The open sharing of such “individual-level consumer complaint data”—limited to credit card complaints for now, though the bureau is proposing a policy on further disclosures [PDF]—marks a first for a financial regulator, according to CFPB chief of staff Scott Pluta. Click here, start scrolling (or searching), and anyone with Internet access can turn up a listing that displays the reason for a complaint (i.e. “APR or interest rate” or “billing disputes), the type of response the consumer has received from the company, and whether or not that response was “timely.”
