CFPB Online Complaint Portal

Oliver Wyman is analyzing credit reporting submissions (See note 1) made against the Nationwide Credit Reporting Agencies (NCRAs) (See note 2) via the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) online portal.

The CFPB created the online portal to “help consumers connect with financial companies to understand issues, fix errors, and get direct responses about problems” (See note 3).

Oliver Wyman was commissioned by Equifax, Experian, TransUnion (the “NCRAs”), and Hudson Cook LLP to conduct this analysis which aims to understand the increase in the volume of CFPB credit reporting submissions against the NCRAs from about 78,000 in 2017 to about 259,000 in 2020 (See note 4). In this document, we focus on four specific questions that help explain the current state and recent increase in submissions:

• What do submitters complain about via the CFPB portal?
• How frequently are submitters using the CFPB portal?
• What patterns emerge across CFPB portal submissions?
• What recent changes can we observe in the topics raised by submitters?

This analysis is conducted with submissions data that the NCRAs received from the CFPB portal, augmented with the NCRAs’ own internal data from processing submissions for the period of 2017 to 2020.

Check out the full report.