Releasing complaint data about credit cards, mortgages, student loans, bank accounts, services, and other consumer loans

What are you going to make with #CFPBdata ?

Last summer, we launched our Consumer Complaint Database featuring data about credit card complaints.

Today, based on feedback from the public, we’re expanding it – and increasing the number of complaints from about 19,000 to more than 90,000. Here’s what we’re adding data about:

• Mortgage complaints submitted since we started taking mortgage complaints on December 1st, 2011.
• Complaints about bank accounts and services submitted since we started taking them on March 1st, 2012.
• Private student loan complaints submitted since we started taking them on March 1st, 2012.
• Complaints about other consumer loans (for example, if you got a loan to finance your daughter’s braces) submitted since we started taking them on March 1st, 2012.
• More specificity about the product each complaint is about, where provided. For example, instead of just “mortgage,” you can see if the complaint is about a reverse mortgage or a conventional fixed mortgage, etc.

And we’re not satisfied quite yet – more expansions are coming. In the future, we’ll add even more products and improvements to the user experience.

The best part is: You don’t have to wait for us to build what you’d like to see from the data. We’re releasing this data as an API, as well as in CSV, JSON, PDF, RDF, RSS, XLS, XLSX, and XML – and we’d love to see what you can do with it.

From infographics to iPhone apps, we’ve seen people do amazing things with the credit card complaint data that was available before today.

If you think you’ve found something interesting in the consumer complaint data, we want to hear about it.

We 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.

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.

Scott Pluta is the Assistant Director for the Office of Consumer Response at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

p.s. As an example of what can be done with the data, we gave one of our staff a day to play with it in Microsoft Excel. Here’s what she came up with . Her example only goes to March 22, and as with the database itself, the data hasn’t been normalized, meaning that in many cases apples-to-apples comparisons can’t always be made. For example, companies with more customers could be expected to have more complaints. States with more people, likewise, would be expected to have more complaints.