Since 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has had a public website for collecting important consumer complaints about banks and financial institutions. It’s been an enormous success — more than 1.4 million complaints have already been filed.  

The CFPB posts these complaints on a publicly available, searchable website. They help you find out what other customers are saying before you choose a bank to work with. They encourage financial institutions to treat their customers fairly, because there’s a place to publicly let others know if they don’t. The CFPB also forwards these complaints to companies so that the companies can resolve them directly. According to the Consumer Bureau, 97 percent of complaints get a timely response from the company when the Bureau forwards the complaint.

The new director of the Consumer Bureau wants to shut down the public database and hide all the complaints. Submit a comment now to help us protect the database from being shut down.