LAS VEGAS — Publishing public narratives on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s complaint portal is “not even a better version of Yelp,” according to Richard Hunt, president of Consumer Bankers Association.
“When we think he CFPB is wrong, we go after them. When we think they are right, we give them credit,” he said during a panel at Retail Banking 2016 conference yesterday. “And I think the CFPB is dead wrong about their portal system.” Banks take customer complaints seriously, he added, and the CFPB should at the very least verify those complaints before submitting them into the portal.
The CFPB portal has publicly tracked consumer complaints on its website since 2012. The bureau first proposed the inclusion of customer comments in 2014, and officially unveiled the narratives feature in June 2015, facing a heavy wave of criticism from lenders.
“More concerning is that they [the CFPB] misuse the statistics from the portal,” Camden Fine, president and chief executive of Independent Community Bankers Association, said during the panel. “They are not transparent, and we don’t know how they are slicing and dicing that data. In fact, they can say anything they want about a bank, depending on how they ‘cook the books,’ so to say.”
Overall, the “avalanche” of new regulations has been overwhelming, especially for community banks, Fine said. “The number of new regulations over the last eight years increased by at least 65 new discreet regulations,” he said, adding that the CFPB had a lot to do with it. “In the community banking space, most can’t afford specialists in consumer regulation. So, sometimes it’s the CEO who has to handle those duties,” Fine said.
