Dig in: Releasing credit report and money transfer complaint data

By Scott Pluta – MAY 31, 2013

We promised more expansions and improvements to the Consumer Complaint Database and, just in time for the National Day of Civic Hacking , we’re delivering on that promise.

Today we’re adding:

Complaints about credit reports
Complaints about money transfers
More specificity about certain issues by adding sub-issues. For example, you’ll see more detail about the specific issue around incorrect information on a credit report such the information isn’t the consumer’s, wrong personal information, etc.
The state where the consumer lives. We’ve always had ZIP code, but listing the state can make it even easier to put the data in context.

Adding credit report and money transfer complaints will take the number of complaints in the database to more than 113,000.

Remember, if you think you’ve found something interesting in the consumer complaint data, we definitely want to hear about it and encourage the public, including consumers, analysts, data scientists, civic hackers, and companies that serve consumers, to analyze, augment, and build on the information in the database to develop ways for consumers to use the complaint data or mash it up with other public data sets to reveal potential trends.

Check out our civic hacking challenges and don’t forget to share your work, from visualizations to new tools, by tweeting @CFPB using the hashtag #CFPBdata.

The consumer complaint database is just another example of our support for an open-data agenda. Our Project Catalyst team also will be using this data to support innovation in the consumer finance space.