The CFPB today issued the first in a series of new monthly reports on consumer complaints. The report covers complaint volume by product, state and company, and this first report includes a product spotlight on debt collection and a special geographically focused section on complaints in Milwaukee, where the CFPB held a recent field hearing.
Debt collection continued to dominate complaint volumes in the second quarter, followed by credit reporting and mortgages. Consumer loan complaints rose 55 percent from the second quarter of 2014 to 2015, while credit card complaints rose by 17 percent and mortgage complaints by 2 percent. During the same period, complaints about bank accounts fell by 8 percent.
While the report includes a section on the most-complained-about companies, the CFPB noted that it did not weight the data to account for the size of the companies’ customer bases, making the report less useful as a tool for comparison. “The data needs to be viewed in context,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said today. “In fact, we are working on how we can best try to ‘normalize’ complaint data for size and volume.”
