Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray’s defense of his organization’s public complaint database will likely leave many bankers frustrated and unsatisfied.
Cordray was asked recently about bankers’ sentiment towards the database, and whether the CFPB is concerned that it might be disseminating unfounded information.
“It’s just information, that’s what it is,” Cordray told American Banker’s Rob Blackwell. “It can be countered, people can give their own work to show what kind of conclusions can be drawn from it. It’s a free market of ideas.”
Cordray says the CFPB takes two steps to verify complaint data before sharing it: the agency confirms that the consumer filing the complaint has a relationship with the FI in question, and then deletes duplicates (“We take out double hits,” Cordray says). The rest, it seems, is left to the “free market of ideas.”
Cordray’s comments do nothing to address a concerning feature identified by PYMNTS.com in the CFPB’s complaint data: the 21,000 people living in ZIP code 33496 have filed more than 300 complaints since the database’s launch, far far more than any other individual ZIP code in the United States. The CFPB has also declined to respond to a direct request for comment on this issue.
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