Transcript CFPB FinEx Webinar: Using the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database November 17, 2022 Presenter: Darian Dorsey, Deputy Assistant Director, CFPB Office of Consumer Response Facilitator: Heather Brown, Ed.D., CFPB Office of Consumer Education, FinEx Program Lead >>Ms. Robin Dixon-Jefferson: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this afternoon's webinar. Before we get started, my name is Robin Dixon-Jefferson. I'm with the Events Management team. I'll be hosting this event this afternoon. Along with myself is Ms. Tracey Wade, who's also a part of the Events Management team, and we'll be here to assist, should you have any technical difficulties. Before we get started, I just wanted to run over some brief logistics for this afternoon. This Webex—all attendees for this Webex will be muted throughout the entire session. There will be an opportunity on the back end for questions and answers. We are encouraging everyone to please put your questions and or comments in the chat box, which is located on the right-hand side corner of your computer screen. Make sure that the dropdown arrow is addressed to everyone to ensure that the presenters for this afternoon can see and respond back to your questions. And with that said, I will now turn this over to Ms. Heather Brown, who will officially start this presentation. >>Dr. Heather Brown: Thank you so much, Robin. I appreciate you and Tracey and all that you've done to get this prepared and to keep things going smoothly while we're having this webinar. Welcome to everybody. We're so glad you could make it at this week before the Thanksgiving holiday. I think you'll find it a very worthwhile and useful webinar. The title of today's webinar, as you can see, is "Using the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database." I am the project program lead for the CFPB FinEx program. That's the CFPB Financial Education Exchange, which focuses on providing resources to practitioners. A copy of the slide deck will be sent to everyone who registered for the program following the webinar. You can also access over 50 past webinars on personal finance topics on our ConsumerFinance.gov webpage, and I'll show you the exact location and link in a brief presentation I'll give to you as an introduction in a second. We're going to have our Q&A at the end of all the presentation. So please type your questions in the chat as they come to mind, and we'll answer as many as possible at the conclusion of the presentation. I'm going to introduce our distinguished speaker for today and then provide a brief five-minute introduction to the CFPB FinEx program. After that, we'll transition right to the Consumer Complaint Database presentation. So our speaker today is Darian Dorsey. Ms. Dorsey is the Deputy Assistant Director in the Office of Consumer Response. Ms. Dorsey currently serves as the Deputy Assistant Director, and she had joined the CFPB in December of 2010 as a member of the Department of Treasuries implementation team. So she was here from the beginning. Within the Office of Consumer Response., Ms. Dorsey has served in several capacities, including Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Director. Prior to joining CFPB, Ms. Dorsey led the implementation of the Recovery Act reporting efforts at the U.D. Department of Treasury's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, after serving as a research project manager at IFF, a nonprofit community development financial institution. She is an expert on our Consumer Complaints Database, and I thank her for being willing to share her expertise with our CFPB FinEx stakeholders. Now I'm just going to go through a few slides with you on the program and read a disclaimer, and we'll get right into the program. This disclaimer is required for us. This presentation is being made by a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau representative on behalf of the Bureau. It does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Any opinions or views stated by the presenter are the presenter's own and may not represent the Bureau's views. That goes for myself and Ms. Dorsey. This document was used in support of a live discussion and the web demo that you'll get as well, and so it does not necessarily express—when you see these slides later, if you hand them to friends, we put this in so they know that they may have missed some things. It won't express the entirety of the discussion nor the relative emphasis of the topics that are within. Any third-party links that are in the presentation—I don't think there are any today, but these are not necessarily things that were vetted by the Bureau. Were not endorsing those links. We're just referring you to some additional information in those instances. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a 21st century agency that implements and enforces federal consumer financial law and ensures that markets for consumer financial products are fair, transparent, and competitive. This is a screenshot of the site that's online for practitioners. You can get to everything and resources that we talk about through ConsumerFinance.gov. This particular site is where practitioners often want to go to find additional information, and you can see on the right in the top, it says "Connect with Us." If you did not get a direct email for this webinar, in other words, somebody handed it off to you, please know that if you sign up by putting your email in here and clicking "Sign Up," you'll be on our subscriber list. And you'll get three to four emails a month that could talk about Bureau resources that you might find helpful. You can join the CFPB FinEx network, as I've just described. Then, as I said, you'll receive tools and research. We also can let you know about presenters if you want to have a speaker at your organization. Additionally, we have a CFPB FinEx LinkedIn discussion group, and so if you click this link when you get your slides at the end, after the presentation, you can actually go in and request to join and then network with other practitioners that are a member of our LinkedIn discussion group. And that's just another clip of a place that you can join the FinEx network, CFPB network. If you see at the bottom of this slide, it says—it's very light here, but "past webinars," that's where you can go to our past webinar archive, and you can look up over 50 webinars that have happened since 2015. And you can also find us on our YouTube channel. So you can just go search CFPB YouTube and get webinars as well. But this site is for webinars that are focused for practitioners. And with that, I'm going to hand it off to our distinguished speaker of the day, and I will hand the control to Ms. Dorsey. >>Ms. Darian Dorsey: Thanks, Heather, and thank you, Tracey and Robin, for all you do to make these logistics happen. I'm very grateful that I am not in charge of that part of it and get to instead just speak with you all today about the Consumer Complaint Database and consumer complaints generally and how these pieces all fit together. So, without further ado and with all the kind of caveats that Heather laid out at the very beginning, I'll begin kind of moving through this information, but most of the time, I want to spend on a live demo. I think that's most helpful so you kind of get a sense of how to use the tool and then try to save some time at the end for plenty of questions. So first up, I want to talk about where the Office of Consumer Response kind of sits within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So Dodd-Frank, our authorizing statute, directed us to collect, investigate, and respond to consumer complaints, and this is actually one of the six primary functions of the Bureau as listed in statute. So to that end, our office is responsible for facilitating the centralized collection of, monitoring of, and response to consumer complaints regarding financial products or services. So it's a pretty broad set of things that we collect complaints about, and you'll see that as you look at the Consumer Complaint Database in just a little bit. And additionally, we maintain procedures to provide timely responses to consumer complaints and inquiries. So really having a system designed around getting consumers responses is really—it's in our name, and it is kind of in the fiber of who we are from our earliest days. All right. Now, put another way, we always like to break things down in a way that maybe a little more rolls off the tongue a little easier, and that would be we answer consumers' questions, we handle consumers' complaints, and we share data and insights. That's kind of how we think of our work, in these three buckets. Aa lot of it, answering of questions, happens over the telephone, and you can see on our website, you'd see our 855. It's a toll-free number where we answer questions from consumers who maybe don't have access to the internet or just want to talk to a real person. We also handle complaints, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time explaining what that looks like, how that works, and then sharing data insights will be really the main focus for today's conversation, which is how we share data with the public through our Consumer Complaint Database. All right. So in terms of complaints we currently accept, this is a broad list. This is an ever-growing list, I will say. As the market changes and new products come online, they will be nested within these categories or they'll be added if they're entirely new innovations in the space, as long as they're falling under that consumer financial product or service banner. So it's a broad range of products and services, which really makes the Consumer Complaint Database really a robust source of information. So how do we handle complaints? It's important, given all the things that we cover, that we built a scalable operating model that enables us to handle large volumes of complaints every single month. We are handling in the order of roughly 125,000 or more complaints every single month. That requires a lot of talented people, a lot of talented technology, frankly, to really facilitate this process that you see laid out here. But essentially, for the most part, consumers submit complaints to our website, and I'll show you in just a minute what that looks like. But we do also accept complaints over the telephone for consumers who—for any reason really, but if they have—for example, don't have access to the internet or not comfortable with the internet, maybe writing things down is not something they're comfortable with, or if they need assistance in other languages, we can support consumers in 180-plus languages over the telephone. We also do accept complaints that we receive by mail, and we get referrals from other government agencies as well. However we get the complaints, we review and route those complaints to the company for response. That's important when we start looking at the data because you will see the company that we sent the complaint to, and you'll see the category that the company used when they provided their response. And then that response is due back to the consumer and the CFPB within 15 days of receiving the complaint, of the company receiving the complaint. The companies can have up to 60 days to provide a final response, if needed. The vast majority of complaints can and do get responses within the first 15 days, but occasionally, in a really complex matter where there's a lot of moving pieces, companies may need more time. If that's the case, we both let the consumer know and then the company has that full 60 days from the date that they received the complaint to provide a response. Ninety-nine percent of the complaints that we send to companies get timely responses. So companies do a good job of providing timely responses to consumers' issues through this process. And then next up and the thing that we'll spend time on today is talking about where we publish complaints. So we publish complaint information, importantly without information that could be used to identify consumers, so without personal information in our public-facing Consumer Complaint Database. So when we say Consumer Complaint Database, you don't submit a complaint to the Consumer Complaint Database. Consumer Complaint Database is where the data is presented, right? It's a window. It's a subset of that information. And really importantly—and we'll emphasize this on the page when we get to the database—you'll see that we only publish complaints that we have sent to companies for response and to which they've had an opportunity to respond. So complaints that we, for example, have referred to other regulators, such as complaints about companies or depositories with less than $10 billion in assets, those are not going to be listed in the public database because those went to another regulator. Therefore, the company didn't have an opportunity to respond. So this is important. If you look at the database and you don't see a company, it doesn't necessarily mean that we've never gotten complaints about them. It just may mean that either they're not currently responding to complaints or they fall with another government agency, and so it's important to understand that when you're looking at the database, those are going to be the companies you see. You're going to see depositories with assets $10 billion and up and non-bank or non-depository providers of consumer financial products and services and under any of those categories that I showed you earlier, so a very broad list of companies. And I believe last year, around 3,500 companies provided responses through the complaint process. So it's a very broad set of companies and growing every day as we receive complaints about new companies that we haven't already established a connection with. And then lastly, at the end of the process, we give consumers the ability to provide feedback on the company's response. The consumer is really in the best position to know whether the company did what it said it was going to do, whether their response made sense, et cetera, and so we give consumers the ability to provide that feedback, and we both use that feedback in our work but also share it with the company. So companies have a sense of where they've maybe exceeded expectations, met expectations, or fallen short of their customers' expectations. So that is an overview of the process, but it's always, I think, helpful to be grounded in how the complaint process itself works before we talk about what the data that comes out of the process in the Consumer Complaint Database looks like, so understanding a little bit about what you're going to see in the database and what you want. And last thing I'll note on this slide is throughout the process, we keep consumers updated on the status. So as it moves through each stage of the process, there will be email communications or we'll mail a letter if we don't have an email address for someone to keep them up to date on the process of their complaint. All right. And then I'm going to pivot now to the Consumer Complaint Database but just wanted to include, especially for folks who are not able to attend or for you for a handy reference later, this screenshot of the Consumer Complaint Database landing page with the link to where you can get to this this database. All right. So before we get to the questions part, I'm going to share my screen. Fantastic. All right. Right now what I have displayed is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau landing page. I always find it helpful for you to be able to find this later, to show you where it lives, where each of these pieces are going to live. So from our landing page, again, the toll-free number that I mentioned up here for consumers that need to give us a call for any reason, whether to check the status of a complaint if they want to, if they really would like to speak to someone in a language other than English, they can give us a call at this toll-free number. And then right below that, you'll see the "Submit a Complaint" link. So just to give you a sense of what it looks like from a consumer's perspective as they start the process, this is where a consumer would go to submit a complaint. As you'll see here, we receive and send more than 10,000 complaints to companies every week. If we find another agency that's better able to assist, we'll send it to them and let you know, and that's what I was getting at just a minute ago about what's in the public database is not going to include things that we've referred to other agencies. I also want to highlight something we've added this year is the video. It's a nice quick video really walking people through what they need to provide when they submit a complaint, how the process works, et cetera. And this is a really, I think, helpful resource for people who learn in that way. We also have some tips. Before someone starts a complaint, we list the products and services that a consumer can complain about, if they don't see it there, linking them to another resource. So again, if you go to our public database and you're not seeing a product, this is a good place to go back and check and see, "Oh, well, it looks like that's not one that they're going to accept complaints about," but you can see USA.gov here as a resource. Similarly, so you can see what to do before submitting a complaint. We've got some tips here for consumers as well as we link to some frequently asked questions. So for consumers, maybe they have a question. Maybe it's not a complaint, and they really want to maybe dig into it before they submit a complaint. We try to link consumers back to those resources. And then in terms of what's most important to include in a complaint, this is really important to make sure that consumers get a good response. If a consumer writes a complaint that doesn't have a lot of detail, has more anger than information, they're probably not going to get a great response from a company because the company may not be able to make heads or tails of the issue. So we'd really like to highlight this and for you all as financial practitioners to know as you're working with people or educating people, we really try to create this as something of a checklist to help people who write complaints so that they get good responses to the issues that they need responses to. And then lastly, we want to make sure we let consumers know how we share their data. Obviously, we're going to talk about the public database. There's obviously other sharing that we do consistent with the applicable law to support supervision, enforcement, market monitoring, and more. And then consumers finally—with all these other menus hidden, you can quickly start a new complaint by setting up a login, setting up a password, and then consumers can begin to submit a complaint. But I just wanted to give this a little bit of a layout of this, so if you're partly here for this webinar and want to understand where these complaints come from, how do they come in, et cetera. Once we get a complaint, we're going to send it to a company that the consumer lists, and they're through the complaint process. They're going to be selecting the products and issues that they have an issue with, and that's what you'll see expressed in the Consumer Complaint Database. So with that, let me jump to the Consumer Complaint Database. I'll jump back to the homepage for just a moment to show you how to get there. So I told you, "Submit a Complaint," it's right up here at the top. We always want to make sure consumers can find that and that's readily available. But under Data and Research, among the many resources that are out on the Bureau's website, one of the things you'll see is this Consumer Complaint Database. It is an expression in data form of some of the information we get through the complaint process. The Consumer Complaint Database, again, a really rich landing page. This is obviously not so much designed around the average consumer but more so around people who use data, who are thinking about answering bigger questions or understanding trends, things like that. And so we have important information to understand. Like I mentioned before, the database includes complaints that have been sent to companies, and they're available after 15 days, which is relevant when you're looking at maybe complaints that have come in the last two weeks. You're not going to have a full picture until at least 15 days have gone by. There's a whole bunch of different ways to look at the data, but I'll highlight that in just a moment. But then there's a lot of more granular information about what complaint data do we publish when as well as some information around things to consider over here on the right-hand side, like complaint volume. You don't want to make—you know, kind of jump to conclusions just because a company has a large volume of complaints. That may be a reflection of its market share, right? In other cases, if you have a sense of a size of a company relative to its peers, which there's lots of different ways to define peers, you may have a sense of like, "Oh, this company's getting more complaints than its peers. That's interesting." So it's something you just need to be an informed user of the information if you're going to make those types of comparisons, et cetera. So we always want to make sure we highlight that for people. And then, of course, noting that the complaint narratives themselves are consumers' exact words. We've just removed personally identifiable information, and wherever we've done that, you'll just see that information x-ed out. But, of course, this is from the consumer's perspective really explaining the issue in their own words, and so you'll see that we publish that as it comes to us. And there's a little bit more information about various tools that are here but just wanted to make sure you're aware of this, that there's kind of a full list. And then lastly, just all the way at the very end, if you just want to download the data, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, that information's also just available. So I'm going to show you how to use the tool which is, I think, helpful for the broadest set of users, but if what you're looking to do is wanting to connect to an API, there's documentation here, or you can download the information. So, without further ado, let me jump into actually showing what the Consumer Complaint Database looks like. Let me say the database. You'll see there's a few links here. You can see there's a few links here. You can see I've clearly clicked on my usual three. But I'll jump into Explore Data and Trends because I think that's a great place to start. It takes you to the homepage, essentially, of the Consumer Complaint Database. The first thing you'll notice here is there's a lot, right? There's a lot going on, but right up here at the top, we really put these key anchor points, so things to know before you use this database, how we use complete data, and technical documentation. A lot of the things to know before you use this database, I've already kind of reviewed on the homepage, but I want to just highlight for you the technical documentation, which I think can sound really intimidating. But one of the things that's most important here is it has release notes. So every time we update the database or add a feature or there's some other kind of change, that's going to be captured here. So if you're ever looking at the data and you see something unexpected, you may want to check here and just see if there was a change around that time. And then there's also a field reference. So if you want to know what each of the fields in the database mean, you can go to the field reference. So again, just so you're kind of an informed user of the data, we want to make sure all this information is at your fingertips. So I'm going to jump back to the database landing page, jump right back into Explore Data and Trends. Okay. So from here, we'll kind of get into the real meat of the database itself. The tool is organized with a search bar at the top that shows you all of your filters that are applied, and then the filter bar, all the way down the left-hand side allows you to apply different filters to narrow the information. This green bar here shows the total number of complaints that have been published. This is smaller than the total number we've received, because only complaints that have been sent to companies and to which companies have had an opportunity to respond are going to be listed here, and those complaints are going to be listed when the company responds or at 15 days, whichever comes first. In this case, you're seeing about 1.6 million out of about 3 million, and that is because we default the view to the most recent three years. So on the left-hand side where you see the filter results, you can see a date range, but you can also see these little toggle buttons. So I can quickly toggle and just say let me see what's in the last 12 months, what's in the last 6 months, right? So you can toggle along, and as I'm moving along, it's updating these counts. Similarly, all the filters around the left-hand side, as you apply filters or change your date ranges, these numbers are also going to update. So it gives you a quick sense of count as you're using a tool and as you're applying new filters, and importantly, I always just remind folks to be sure to check your filters, especially if you're seeing something that you're like, "That doesn't—why am I getting zero?" It may be the combination of filters. So up here at the top, you're able to go through and change those filters as needed. So what I want to start with is moving down the page, right under this green bar. You'll see these tabs. There's a trends tab, a list tab, and a map tab. This is just different ways to visualize the information. Initially, when we launched the complaint database in 2012, it was a list view, but we really wanted to make the tools usable as possible for the broadest group. And so to make it more instructive, we added the trends view, and that's what we're going to jump to in just a moment. But we also have map, and so I'm going to start the demo in terms of actually walking you through just a few quick examples of how the map tool works, how the how the trends tool, how the list view, how to do a search, how to find company-specific information, and then show you a little bit lastly of the tour that's built in. So jumping to the map first. So again, I've got my three-year filter already applied, and in there, in that three-year filter, I have the ability to see a map of the United States, and that includes complaints and complaints-per-thousand population. So initially, when you look at this kind of graphical map of the United States, you're going to see that California is shaded and as is Texas and Florida, New York. States with a lot of population are a little bit more teal; in this case, a little bit of a darker teal. But that's helpful to know that there's large populations and large volumes, but it might be more helpful to know complaints per thousand. So we have that built in using the most current census data that we have at the time. So you can actually get a sense of where complaints are coming from relative to the population. So in this case, looking across the United States over the past three years, it is actually Georgia that has the highest complaints per population. So 11.42 complaints per thousand people in Georgia. And so by hovering over any of the states, you can get a quick look at that. If I were to click on Georgia, it would apply a Georgia filter to this so that everything that I'm looking at—and now I can jump around to the trends or the list view and see more information about complaints specifically in Georgia. As I look at this map, I hope we've got some people here from Wyoming and North Dakota and South Dakota and Iowa and Nebraska and West Virginia, who can get the word out about the availability of the ability to submit a complaint. But this is sort of the lay of the land for the last three years, kind of where we're getting the most complaints from versus the least, so just a quick helpful, I think, way to get a sense, especially if your work is localized to a particular state, this may be especially helpful to you. Next up, I want to think about the ability to apply filters here. So I'm going to jump all the way down to one of the last filters here for one of the special populations. I'll move slowly down, and we have tags here. In this case, the Servicemember tag, if I check that, it's going to update my map, and now I can see where we're getting complaints from servicemembers across the United States. So if you're familiar with these areas, you may recognize where bases are located, et cetera. But this is just one of the examples of one of the filters that you can apply is looking at servicemembers. You can also kind of—this gives you, like I said, a map view, but if you want to know what are servicemembers complaining about—and this again is over the last three years—we keep some of these handy date references here for you. You can see it's 94,000 complaints, and you can see how those complaints are distributed, heavily in credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports. And anywhere you see a down arrow in the Consumer Complaint Database, you'll be able to use that to expand, and now you can see that of those 51,524, about 50,735 complaints from servicemembers and their families are about credit reporting, so gives you a quick way of seeing information. All right. So we will jump back up, and I'm going to clear those filters and then walk through a trends example so you can see how that works. So if I scroll all the way up, I'm going to clear all my filters. We made it a nice friendly red there so you can see it. I want to show an example of a custom date range. So let's say I'm just interested in this calendar year. So I will simply put in the—starting with January 1st of this year, I'm going to cut off, like I said, those last 15 days, because that means that could include some complaints that are still outstanding, that companies still have that initial 15 days to provide a response. When I do that, you'll see these numbers update, right? So we're looking at a smaller group of complaints. It's updated the map. It's updated all the counts throughout. But we want to look at trends this time. So we want to see, okay, over the last 12 months, what are we seeing? So looking here and scrolling down, you actually get a trends visualization, a graph that's built in. You can change the date interview interval. So if you wanted to, you could look at complaints by week, right? If you wanted more granular information, you could see how things fluctuate by week as well as by day. Day can get distracting if you're looking at a long period of time, but it is available. So we want to make this as flexible and useful as possible. But I'll keep it with month for now, and in this case, each line represents the number of complaints that's coming from that product or service as listed in the right-hand side. Now, this table on the right is only going to be the five most complained-about products because it's a rather long list and we want to make sure that the graph isn't overwhelmed with granularity. But you can also change how the chart is displayed, and this chart stacks on itself. So you can see that credit reporting, credit repair services, and other personal consumer reports, that's the green bar, and then you can see how debt collection adds on top of it and credit cards and prepaid cards, checking and savings, and mortgage, kind of how they all stack up to that overall gray bar of all of their products, so just to give you a sense of these five products really do represent the lion's share of what we get, and the gray is kind of everything else. But I will stick to the simpler trend line for this example. In this case, let's say credit reporting is not the topic I'm interested in today. I'm going to, I'm interested in debt collection. Again, I can go over to my left-hand side, go to the product and sub-product and select debt collection. I can just select all of debt collection to see how that trend has changed over time. Importantly, this little dashed line, as I move my cursor a along the line, it's going to tell me what the monthly total was in a particular time. So this is showing you that for the month of October, there were around 4,584 complaints about debt collection, so gives you that information, but you can see that it was actually last year in the March–April time frame where debt collection complaints were higher, so just gives you a little bit of information of how things are trending in a particular space. However, maybe I'm not interested in all of debt collection. Maybe I'm actually interested in medical debt, right, what kind of complaints we're getting about medical debt. You have the option to go through and deselect each of the items, but I like to just deselect debt collection overall and then just pick medical debt. So when I do that, I see a similar trend of March and April of last year was when we saw the higher numbers of—or earlier this year, rather, of medical debt-related debt collection complaints, a little bit over 900 complaints both of those months. And then you can sort of see the most current month. All right. So that gives us the example of that, and scrolling all the way down to the end, we see debt collection. We can see kind of a breakdown, but we also can see the issues. So because we're looking at medical debt, it's going to show us the medical debt issues that the consumer selected, which in this case leads at about 3,600 with attempts to collect debt not owed, so again, just giving a nice sense of what consumers are submitting complaints—what are the issues they're encountering and that they're submitting complaints to us about and to which companies are responding. Okay. So jumping up, walked through a map example, through a trends example. Now I want to shift to a list example. So let's say you want to read some of these complaints. So you've seen this medical debt, these medical debt complaints, and now you're interested in actually reading them. You can go here to the list view, and what you're going to see is the list where each of these—you could click on this blue number, and it will actually take you to that individual complaint. And if there's a narrative, you'll be able to read it, but narratives are only published if the consumer consents to publication and after we remove the personally identifiable information. And that means there may be a lag between when the company responds and when the narrative is available, because we really want to make sure from a privacy perspective we get that right and we remove that information. You'll see, in this case, sort of this list view. But let's say you just want to read complaint narratives. You just really want to understand what are consumers complaining about, what kind of issues are they reporting. So you can click this button right here at the top to only show complaints with narratives, and now it's going to filter it. Again, you're going to see smaller and smaller numbers because I have a date filter for just this year. I'm just looking at medical debt, and now I'm only looking at complaints that have narratives. So this is not going to be a great way to do a trends view with narratives as the focus, but it is a good way to look at what exactly consumers are complaining about. And what you'll see is consumers providing the details. In this first example, you'll see that they're describing when the insurance was billed, about not hearing from a doctor again, now there's a collection notice, et cetera, et cetera. You can really read that information, and you can see how the company categorized its response and that the response was on time. So it gives you a quick sense of what's going on, but as much as this is a useful user interface and you can scroll through and read, if what you're looking to do is more analysis or you want to be able to really see them all together, you do have the ability to either print this information or you can export the information. So you can do a few different options here. You have a CSV file, which works really well with Excel. You have a JSON file, and then you have the option to select between filtered dataset, which is only going to be based on your filters or the full dataset. As you note here, it says not recommended due to very large file size, because this means you're going to be exporting over 3 million complaints. So we don't recommend that, but there are situations where someone may want to do that. But once you've made these two selections, it's going to give you a link that you can save for later or share with a colleague, and you can start the export. I won't do that today, but it will just open an Excel file for you. And in that Excel file, the fields of information you see in the display will also be included in Excel. So now you can do your own pivot tables. You can read the narratives together. You can sort of do your own analysis in that way. So that is how you export the information to do your own analysis if you're interested. Okay. I want to go next to show you the search. So right here at the top of the site, we have this Search Complaint Data. We have these advanced search tips. So if you're like, "I'm not great at doing these searches and coming up with these searches," we've provided these tips for you. I use them myself all the time, and we tried to sort of explain kind of how they're best used, and you can combine them. I always like to note that they are case-sensitive. So where you see the capital "OR," that's important so that it finds complaints that have loan or mortgage in the complaint narrative. That is going to get you a lot of results. So you probably want to think about a little bit more of a complicated search string if you want to use the search feature. But before I start searching, let's walk through this with an example because I think sometimes that can be most helpful. So I'm going to jump back to trends just for the purpose of we're going to look and see about search information. In this case, I'm going to go ahead, and it's defaulted to all complaints because I cleared all of my filters. But I'm going to go back, and I'll just say let's see what we've gotten just this year through the end of October, again, wanting to kind of account for that 15 days that companies have to respond to their customers issues. All right. So this is going to give you those first 10 months of the year, and in this case, I'm going to say that I'm interested in looking specifically at vehicle loans, right? So again, if you expand this list of products and sub-products, you'll see these major products, and then you can see by using this down arrow, it will expand it. And now I can look at just loans, and one of the things that is very important to a lot of families in the United States is access to a vehicle, right? And so we want to know a little bit about repossessions in this case. So I'm going to enter a search term for repossession, but instead of trying to list all the different ways that I could spell "repossession," I'm just going to type the beginning of "repossess" and add a star. So it's going to do this wildcard search. So any of kind of the variations on repossess, it's going to search the issue categories as well as any of the published narratives. So once you start applying a search, again, just like earlier when we looked at things with narratives, once you start doing a search, you're not going to have the full, full picture. You're going to have things that have narratives, maybe some issues. So the counts are not going to be as helpful, and you're going to want to probably jump back to your list view to read complaints about repossession. But it's a helpful way to drill into a topic you're interested in. So just using the word repossess and just looking at this year's complaints, I can now see this trend map. I have a general sense of, okay, this is how the term "repossession" is appearing in issues and narratives from consumers. I can jump to the list view. Here again, this is founded in an issue, but we're not really seeing a narrative here. So if I wanted to just read complaints that mention repossession, now I can click "only complaints with narratives," and now you can actually read the details of what the consumer said about the repossession. So all of that information is right there. The very last example that I want to provide, I'm going to take off the narrative and I'm going to take off the loan, and now I'm going to use this clear to clear my search terms. So I'm just looking at complaints received this year. So I want to look at how you can find information about a specific company by looking at two companies that have been in the consumer financial protection news this year. The first is EdFinancial. So if I'm interested in that company, because maybe I read press release, I can jump down to the company name field and type in "EdFinancial." Now this is going to be the corporate name. So a company that has a lot of different aliases, you're going to have to know a little bit about what you're looking for, know a little bit about their structure to figure out which company is likely going to be listed. But it's the company we send the complaint to for response. It's responsible for answering for its affiliates. So EdFinancial Services was a company the Bureau took action against earlier this year. So if you were interested in understanding what kinds of issues consumers are complaining about, you could simply look at EdFinancial Services and be able to see those complaints, read those complaints, see a trend, see a list, and again, use that export if that's what you're interested in, if you want to be able to read them. I'll do just another quick example of another company that was in in the news, which was TransUnion. Now combining EdFinancial Services and TransUnion in your search probably doesn't make a ton of sense but just wanted to show you, you can add more and more companies. And so TransUnion, again, was in the news related to consumer financial protection work recently, and so looking at them, adding them, you see the volume of complaints they have here. You can also, again, jump to something like trends. Not surprisingly, overwhelmingly, the complaints are related to credit reporting. That would sort of makes sense. You could see these on a map, et cetera. But this just gives you a sense of how you could get to company-level information, and all the same features are going to be available in terms of what complaints are about. I can expand this to see what types of credit reporting issues consumers are complaining about, such as incorrect information on your report is the top issue followed by improper use of report, followed by problem with the credit reporting company's investigation, so lots of information you can get to pretty quickly. So, with that, I think there have been a bunch of questions that I've seen popping up as I've been speaking. So I'm going to clear all my filters and see if I can if I can access those. I may ask Heather to get me started with the first one while I get my window expanded so I can see the questions. >>Dr. Brown: Sounds good. Yes, you had quite a few questions. Thank you for that wonderful presentation. I learned some additional things about the database myself. Number one, the first question was, does the CFPB handle complaints about medical billing? And I'm suspecting the person may have asked because when there was a screen that said what we accept, I don't think it was listed. But you did later show the data, and it is—I know it's a new emphasis of our Director. >>Ms. Dorsey: Sure. So this—yeah, it's excellent question. What we take is complaints about consumer financial products and services—so debt collection is a consumer financial product or service, and I should say that caveat that Heather walked us through at the beginning about not representing the Bureau or providing legal advice, I am definitely not providing that, not even a lawyer. But we would take complaints about medical debt, the collection of that debt, but when it comes to doctors' offices, doctors' offices are not going to be providers of consumer financial products and services. So third-party debt collectors—so that's a company that buys debt and collects that debt—we would take complaints about that. But we would not take complaints about doctors' offices or hospitals themselves but more so related to the debt. >>Dr. Brown: Great. Let's see. The second question was, is the 125,000 complaints a month what your run rate has been, or have you seen an increase or decrease in an area, in any area? >>Ms. Dorsey: Yep. No, that's an excellent question. Our complaint volume has increased rather dramatically through the pandemic. There are a lot of complaints that we are not able to send to companies for one reason or another, that that's included in that 125,000 complaints a month. There are going to be sometimes tens of thousands of complaints that they're either incomplete or not about consumer financial products and services and other things. So those will get referred elsewhere and won't be listed here. But yes, we have seen a dramatic increase in complaint volume. It started before the pandemic but continues. But I can show you very quickly, if we're looking at complaints of over time, looking just at the last three years. You can see kind of the overall volume over the last three years. We've gone from looking—if I look all the way back at December of 2019, you're talking a fairly low number of complaints published, which again is just a subset of the things that we receive in total. There are lots of things that, for one reason or another, don't go to companies. But if you look at October, we're publishing 75,000 complaints, so three times as many complaints being published, which reflects the overall increase in complaints that we've seen throughout the pandemic. >>Dr. Brown: Great. Thank you so much for that. The next question was, is there a filter on the CFPB's end for complaints that are repetitive? >>Ms. Dorsey: So what we do is when we get a complaint about a company, we're going to send that complaint to the company for a response. Companies can and should be using the options that are afforded to them in the company portal that each company has. If the company has already received that complaint from the CFPB and has already responded to the issues that are in that complaint, companies can report that as a duplicate. And duplicates are not published in the Consumer Complaint Database, and duplicates are also not included in our official reporting, such as our annual report to Congress. If a company ever has an experience where we get beyond a handful of those from an individual consumer, there additional steps we can take, but it is incumbent upon companies to let us know whether this is an issue that is actually a new issue. So they need to respond to it because maybe it builds on a prior issue or whether it is truly a duplicate of a prior issue, and our company portal manual provides more detail about what we mean by duplicate. But it really has to do with a complaint that does not introduce new issues from a prior complaint. >>Dr. Brown: Great. Thank you. The next question was, does CFPB handle complaints regarding financial aid from hospitals or medical debt? >>Ms. Dorsey: So medical debt, yes. When we get into financial aid, it depends on if it falls under the definition of financing of a loan or credit that's extended. We would take complaints about consumer credit products but not just generally about medical bills from a hospital or from a doctor's office. >>Dr. Brown: Okay, great. The next question says published complaint means added into the complaint data set? And yes, that is correct. You're saying when you go into the database, it's published, correct? >>Ms. Dorsey: Right. We only publish the things that we've sent to companies for response, and that's why there's that difference between what we've received and what we publish, because we can only publish what we've been able to send to companies. But yes, that's why we always say we spend some time trying to help people think about the—"Submit a Complaint" is where—is the start of the process. The Complaint Database is an outcome of a subset of that process. >>Dr. Brown: Okay. Thank you. The sixth question was, does a company have to provide a resolution to consumers? For example, I often deal with issues consumers are having with Zelle, mostly unauthorized transactions, and consumers usually get a response from the bank that it isn't their problem. If the consumer were to file a complaint through the CFPB, would that be an acceptable response, or do you work toward actually resolving the issue for consumers? >>Ms. Dorsey: So we work within the authority that we have in Dodd-Frank, and that, as I kind of touched on in the very beginning, is focused on getting consumers' responses to their issues. So in Dodd-Frank, companies are expected to provide timely responses that provide an overview of any communications they've had with the consumer, information on the outcome, but it does not actually compel companies to do what the consumer has requested be done. Now, many times a consumer submits a complaint, whether it's directly to the company or whether they've tried that and they come to us, and a company may take a closer look at an issue and decide that there is something that they can do. There is something they can fix or something they can do to resolve the issue. We hope to facilitate that kind of process, but not all not all complaints are going to be resolved to the satisfaction of the consumer. Now, we're going to look at complaints and determine from a holistic place, from looking overall at complaints, whether companies are providing those timely, accurate, and complete responses, whether we see a pattern of a company providing really poor responses. And of course, if we find anything that looks like they've run afoul of consumer financial protection law, we are going to share those with our colleagues and kind of work through the usual processes for those things. But at an individual consumer level and at the volume of complaints that we handle, there are going to be instances where consumers do not get what they want out of the process, and that's why we give them the ability to provide feedback at the end that we share both with the company and comes back to us to inform our work. >>Dr. Brown: Okay, great. Thank you, Darian. I have another question that I'm not quite sure about, but I'll just read it as it is. >>Ms. Dorsey: Sure. >>Dr. Brown: Does the CFPB handle complaints about non-financial companies but for which that non-financial company regularly reports to a credit reporting agency such as a telephone, cell phone provider, apartment rental company? >>Ms. Dorsey: That's a great question. So the list of companies, that's actually one of the specific things that we call out. So I'm going to jump just really quickly to the Submit a Complaint page, because that is, I think, a really common question that we get. One of the things that we noted specifically on the landing page for Submit a Complaint is pointing people to USA.gov for complaints about things like phone, internet, and cable companies, and other companies that what sort of regulators would say furnish information to the credit reporting companies. So no, if we got a complaint about a phone, internet, or cable company, we're going to tell the consumer where they need to submit that complaint. So if the consumer is complaining about something like that or something else that's a non-financial company but maybe is putting information on someone's credit report, those complaints, we're not going to be able to send to companies. We're going to have to redirect the consumer somewhere else. So that's an excellent question, and yeah, for the financial companies that are reporting there, that's a different situation. But for these types, these and other companies—gyms are another one that we would not—we would not take complaints about those. If they come in, we'll just redirect them where they need to go, and that's again why everything we receive is not everything that we publish in the Consumer Complaint Database. >>Dr. Brown: Okay. Thank you so much. When you say gyms, do you mean like physical places to work out? >>Ms. Dorsey: Yes. >>Dr. Brown: Oh, is that right? Okay. Interesting. >>Ms. Dorsey: Oh, yes. With the number—when people ask me and they're like, "Have you ever received a complaint about X?" and at this point, having been at the Bureau for about 11-plus years, my usual answer is probably, "So yes, we get complaints about really kind of"—I think a lot of people associate money with consumer financial protection, right? >>Dr. Brown: Yes. >>Ms. Dorsey: It's like, "Well, if it costs me money, then it's that," and so that's where our sort of authorities can be confusing to the general public. But no, just because it costs you money, such as a gym, that maybe is reporting on your credit report for non-payment or something like that or they're trying to go after you for debt collection or something. Those are not going to be things that we're going to be able to process. >>Dr. Brown: Okay, great. Okay. And the next question was, what share of consumers allow you to publish their complaints? >>Ms. Dorsey: It varies a little bit by the financial product and service, but it tends to hover right around 58 to 60 percent of consumers that submit complaints on our website, which is 95 percent of consumers submit complaints to our website. We want them to have informed consent. So when they read that statement and they check that box, it's about 58 to 60 percent kind of across all product categories. But it depends on like how comfortable the consumer is. So I think the number—it's a little bit lower in some products, a little bit higher than others, but hovers right around 58 to 60 percent. >>Dr. Brown: Okay. Well, we still have about six minutes, but I want to check in with you and see if you're getting tired because you have a lot of questions. >>Ms. Dorsey: No, keep going. >>Dr. Brown: Okay, great. Are there any analytics around frivolous complaints versus complaints with merit? >>Ms. Dorsey: So our complaint definition is very similar to that of other federal financial regulators and really others in general. The technical long-winded version is a consumer expression of dissatisfaction with an identifiable entity about their personal experience. So in more layman's terms, that means a consumer has an issue with a company about something they experience. So we don't stand between consumers and the companies that provide services to them and make determinations about whether the consumer's complaint is good enough for a company to respond to. The company is providing a service to that consumer. That consumer has an issue. And we want to connect those two parties so that they can get to the bottom of that. Sometimes that's going to be a company explaining a disclosure to a consumer, and that's a perfectly good outcome. There are going to be other times where a company has made a mistake, and they're going to be maybe refunding a charge or otherwise, like adjusting an interest rate, right? So we don't want to disrupt that good conversation. But we also understand that not all consumer complaints are going to be about issues that have tons of great insight into maybe a company mishandling something. Sometimes it's just going to be confusion, and that's why it's really important—and I'll highlight this now—the availability of something like our annual report to Congress, which you can find on our website. We link to it at the top of the Consumer Complaint Database landing page. There's a really handy link to our 2021 annual report to Congress. It comes out every March, and this report is, I think, nearing around a hundred pages. And it really gets into an analysis of the issues, and that's what's most important is that we're looking at the analysis of the issues. But again, as I talked about a little bit earlier, if a company's having an issue with—you know, they're seeing duplicate complaints, they're seeing complaints from—they've determined have been from, submitted by an unauthorized third party, and have not been submitted by the consumer, they can return those back to us. And those are not going to be published. So companies should really use the company portal manual to really get a lot of clarity around that. But the definition of a complaint, which then informs what's published, really gets at the issue if a consumer has a problem with the company, and we expect the company to provide a timely, accurate, and complete response to that consumer's issue. And the company's assessment of whether or not it's frivolous is not relevant in that process. >>Dr. Brown: Okay. Very interesting, interesting question and response. Okay. Eleven, why does the complaint number in the database, the blue number, differ from the number reflected on the complaint when received by the company? >>Ms. Dorsey: This is just to further safeguard privacy. The number that that a consumer receives, which is also the same number that a company sees in its company portal, that number is part of how we authenticate consumers when they call us with questions. So we have limited information. Unlike banks and other financial institutions, we only know information about the consumers that they've given us in their complaint. So that number functions as a unique identifier. So we are able to—if someone calls and seeks information, we're not just going off their name and address, which is commonly available information. We also need that complaint number, or we're going to need a lot more information from the consumer. So that is why we don't publish the complaint numbers that we use with consumers, but we know that consumers and companies are going to talk through the complaint process. So we want companies and consumers to have the same number to facilitate those conversations, but we don't want to make those numbers readily available to the public. >>Dr. Brown: Okay. Makes sense. Is there any point on a particular complaint at which the back-and-forth between creditor and consumer escalates and the CFPB becomes directly involved? >>Ms. Dorsey: So there are times we are going to ask follow-up questions, but the process is—it is a one-bite-at-the-apple process. So the consumer submits the complaint. The company has 15 days or up to 60 days to provide a response, and then the consumer finds feedback on that response. We're going to be analyzing and looking at those and using cohorts and other methods that we talk about in our annual report here to look at those things, but if we go through those things and we find that we have questions for a company, we may ask individual questions to a company. But again, at the volumes that we handle, we are not going to get into individual complaints very often in the sense of trying to get a different outcome for the consumer. But there are times where we will reach out because we think something's gone awry, and we will send a company a request through the portal. One of our investigators will have follow-up questions. But there isn't sort of an escalation model at that point. It's really incumbent upon the consumer to provide feedback at the end of the process if the company's response didn't meet what they were looking for. >>Dr. Brown: Okay, great. Well, I think we have time for one last question here. Does the record require the consumer's consent to appear in the database, or is it just the consumer narrative? >>Ms. Dorsey: The complaint—just the consumer narrative requires consent, the data itself that's disclosed at the front end of the process, but it is the information without any PII, which if you look at the list of things, it's going to be the state, usually a partial zip code, product/sub-product, issue/sub-issue, so nothing personal to consumer at all, only the narrative if that's really where they opt into that. But the other information is shared in the public Consumer Complaint Database, just as it would be if we got a Freedom of Information Act request. So sharing it through the public database is a lot more efficient way to make sure that the public broadly has information about what's going on in complaints, but the narrative is something that we get consent for before we scrub and publish. >>Dr. Brown: Excellent. Well, you have really generated a lot of questions. There's still quite a few. For those of you that didn't get your question answered, If you want to go ahead and send it to the CFPB, which is CFPB_FinEx@cfpb.gov, we'll try to get the answers back to you through your email. I really appreciate everyone coming. Darian, that was such an interesting presentation, and you did such a great job answering this rigorous Q&A. And thank you to the audience for being engaged, and thanks again to the Events team for supporting us on this. This is going to conclude our webinar for today, and again, if you have other, additional questions, you can—there we go. Thank you. Because I was having trouble talking and typing . You can email me there and move your questions that you didn't get answered there, and we'll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Someone asked about the recording. I did request a copy of the recording, and so if it is in good shape and I get it, I will also get that posted online and let people be notified when it's available. You can put in a request for that in the CFPB FinEx box also if it's really important so I can follow up with you. Okay. Thank you again. Have a great day and look forward to seeing you. I think the next webinar is in January. So you'll be getting an email. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.