Thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question please press the star 1 and please record your name. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Host you may begin. Great. Thank you everyone. This is the CFPB Office of Financial Education. I'm very excited to have everyone here today for our Webinar on the CFPB Consumer Complaint System. So I will say my usual few quick introductory notes, if only I can get the slides to advance. There we go. So first of all, our standard disclaimer that this does not constitute legal guidance and is points of view of the speakers rather than the Bureau. Just quickly, as I think I've said and many of you have probably heard before, the CFPB helps consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, enforcing those rules and empowering consumers. We do this through educating consumers. Enforcing and supervising banks, credit unions and other financial companies. And also, studying, gathering, analyzing information to better understand consumers and markets. And within the Bureau, the Office of Financial Education, who's hosting this call, is within the Consumer Education and Engagement Division. That's the part of the Bureau that sort of is consumer-facing in terms of education and other resources. And our goal is to educate and empower consumers to make better, informed decisions. And we do that by strengthening channels for delivering financial education. And by that, we really mean working with folks like you through FinEx and financial educators and people who are working directly with consumers who want to help you all do your work as well as you can. And also by supporting consumers directly and researching and identifying trends and effective practices. And then, as always, I do my quick plug for FinEx which is the Financial Education Exchange. I assume you're all signed up but if you know others who would like to, they can email our inbox CFPB_FinEx@cfpb.gov. We will continue to have Webinars and additional activities being added as we progress We launched only about a couple of months ago. Just one quick advertisement for the future which is that our next Webinar - they're usually the third or fourth week of the month but due to the (unintelligible) of August, we're going to do it in the first week of September on the Your Money, Your Goals toolkit which is a resource that you can use now with clients. And then we have additional ones planned every month after that. We're still lining up the topics for those. You'll hear about those as they get planned. I always call attention to our resource inventory which you can see on our Web site. The address is on the screen. Consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education. And that's the place where you can find almost all the resources you'll hear about today. In a few cases, there are new things that haven't been uploaded yet though they will soon. So we invite you all to use that. And then my last kind of standard invitation is to join the Financial Education Discussion Group on LinkedIn which we moderate and which allows - we put our material up there, but we also encourage all of you to post things that you are working on or also post questions to the group. It's about 1100 people on that group now. So it's a nice resource I think. So we'll turn to the content now. I do want to just quickly note that I know sometimes people have had trouble with the logging into the live meeting software. I'm hoping everyone on the line today has either been able to do that or if anyone's having trouble, I can send you a PDF of the PowerPoint deck. So just send an email if you need that. We're hoping that everybody just can at least follow along on a deck even if they're not able to get into the Webinar. And so for those who are doing that we are now on Slide 10, Office of Consumer Response. Our speaker for the day is the Chief of Staff for the Consumer Response Unit. And she will tell you about what Consumer Response does and how the complaint system can help you both directly in working with your clients and consumers and also in learning about what's happening in the broader consumer financial marketplace. So welcome. Thank you. So as indicated, I am the Chief of Staff for the Office of Consumer Response, but the easiest way to think about what we do - think about three things. We answer consumer questions, we handle complaints and we analyze and share data. Much of what I talk about today will really emphasize the handling of complaints and the analysis and sharing of data. But just so you have a general sense, we really, for this, try to use, you know, the latest technologies to kind of stay on top of answering questions, routing consumer complaints. And then we also really think of sharing data as a way to empower consumers, inform consumer advocates and companies and improve the functioning of the marketplace overall. So I'll talk a little bit about how we help because this is important to understand, particularly given the volume of complaints that we handle. And I want to make sure everyone has a common understanding of what's possible. On the one hand, we are able to offer a degree of individual assistance. So we are able to take complaints and in many cases get them to companies, and companies have about 15 days to provide a response. So that's one of the ways that we can help. So for a lot of consumers who have been unable to get a response from a company or find themselves having difficulty, this is one of things that our complaint process can really help them do which is get a response from a company in writing to their specific issues. The other thing that we do to help is we have market-wide information. So these complaints kind of taken together and currently there are - we've handled over 650,000 consumer complaints. All of those complaints each have some insights but when you look at them together can provide a lot of insight into the problems that consumers are experiencing. So I'll talk a little bit about how we answer questions and handle complaints. So this is just a quick screenshot of our main landing page for the consumerfinance.gov. So this is always the thing I say. If there's one thing you take away from this Webinar know that our Web address is consumerfinance.gov because from there you can find all kinds of resources and tools. Ask CFPB is something that the Bureau has, which has I believe over 1100 answers to consumer questions. That same information that's available at Ask CFPB on our Web site is also available through our toll-free phone number which is found at the top of the Web site. So all of those same questions can be answered over the phone. In addition, we can accept complaints over the phone. And through our phone line, we can connect consumers to services in over 180 languages and that phone number is available Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm Eastern Time. But you can also see here that there's a Submit a Complaint option right at the top of our Web site. So we make that really prominently available so that you don't have to do a bunch of searching. If you have a complaint, we want to know about it. So I'll talk a little bit about a complaint is and so what the definition is. And you'll see this is a nice legal definition that, you know, consumer complaints are submissions that express dissatisfaction or communicate suspicion of wrongful conduct by an identifiable entity related to a consumer's personal experience with a financial product or service which is a really long way of saying it is a consumer that is dissatisfied with a company that provided a financial product or service. It's really as simple as that. And so that's the definition that kind of governs. It's just good to kind of all be on the same page in terms of what that is. There are other ways for whistleblowers and others to get to us but for complaints, this is the definition that we use. So I'll talk a little bit about the complaint process and...This is Slide 16 for those of you following at home. Yes. So the complaint process is fairly straightforward. The first step is submitting a complaint. So if you go to the next slide, you'll see all the ways that we take complaints. Oh sorry. It requires me to pay attention. So from the - to submit a complaint, and I kind of touched on this just a minute ago, but we really accept complaints through a number of channels. Web complaints are one of the most common ways for consumers to submit complaints to us. For consumers that feel comfortable submitting complaints over the Web, it's a really good way to get a very quick response to your complaint. We route complaints -- because we have some automation built in the background -- we are able to route complaints 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So if you come onto our Web site and submit a complaint, it's entirely possible that we'll send that complaint to the company within minutes. In addition, the Web is where you are able to opt-in if you so choose to have your complaint narrative. So the words in the complaint published in the Consumer Complaint Database. That's only available over the Web and it's only available to consumers submitting complaints directly to us. So not through a third-party because we want to ensure that we have the consent of the individual that the experience is about. So - but through the Web, you can opt-in and have that information published in the Consumer Complaint Database which I'll come back to in a minute. But we also accept complaints through a number of other channels. We accept complaints by phone, referral, fax, mail and the occasional email that gets through. But, generally, Weband phone and referral are the main ways that we receive complaints. I'll talk a little bit about - let's go back up one slide. Sorry. So I just want to give you a sense of the products that we accept complaints about. You can see some of the most common - mortgage complaints. We can have groups submitting loans and products and services, but credit cards, pre-paid cards, mortgages, bank accounts and services, student loans, credit reporting, debt collection, money transfer, vehicle loans and leases, payday loans. Really the full range - as well as bank accounts and services complaints. So just a full range of products and services that we accept complaints about. And when you get to our consumerfinance.gov/complaint, you'll be able to kind of pick the one that best describes the issue. Once you're there -- on the next slide -- you will see this is a debt collection example. You can see it's as simple as this. Let's, you know, kind of - the issues that we take complaints about in the debt collection space in this example and the Get Started button will enable you to start actually submitting a complaint. Once you do that on the very first kind of step -- go to the next slide -- you'll be able to check a box and this is what I was talking about just a minute ago. And this is new as of mid-March. But if you're submitting a complaint directly for yourself, you can actually check the box that says you want CFPB to publish the description of what you write in the What Happened field so that others can learn from your experience. And what we do after we have it is we take some steps to remove the personal information from that before we actually publish it. And I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like in a few minutes. Now shifting gears for just a moment. If you are going to submit a complaint on behalf of someone else, so you can check that box because of the sort of opt-in consent complaint submitted on behalf of someone else. Those narratives are not actually subject to publication for the policy, but there are other good reasons why you may want to do that. But I want to make sure if you do opt to submit a complaint on behalf of someone else, you understand how to do it correctly so that you get the proper updates and that type of thing. So the first tip I have is when you get to the part of the form that says your contact information goes in the My Information section, it is indeed your information goes in the My Information. So you really fill it out in the first person. You don't have to kind of guess. Just put your information in the My Information section. And you being you the financial educators, right?Yes. You the financial educators. Okay. Thank you. If they decide to do this. You enter your information right there. And if you were the consumer filling it out yourself you would do it there too. So. Just don't try to guess. Don't try to outthink it. Just fill it out as though you are yourself. And then you'll be able to do - the other tip I have is to be sure you enter your email address. So just - the same thing. When it says, "My Contact Information" make sure it's your contact information because that's the email address that you will use to log-in and be able to view the complaint, view the company's response and so on. So it's really important to have that email address. The next tip is if you are submitting on behalf of someone else, this is where we'll know who that My Information section person was. So here you would just say, "I'm filing on behalf of either myself or someone else." So if you check the Someone Else box, we know that the information above for My Information belongs to you. And then you can let us know, what's your relationship to this person? So this is helpful for us to know kind of who's submitting complaints on behalf of others. So many advocates choose advocate attorney, helping counselor. It really just depends on kind of how you view yourself and your relationship to the client or to the consumer. The other tip I would have is to then, after you've done that, when it says, "Someone Else" then you provide the information for the someone else. So you would put the consumer's contact information in that space. If you're submitting on behalf of a consumer, you'd put their information there. It's very important, obviously, to have things like the mailing address because that's what the company will use to try to match this complaint in their records and understand. I - one of things that we note here at the top of this page is filing on behalf of someone else may require signed written permission. So the company -- and you can imagine this is a good safeguard -- may not be able to discuss a complaint with someone that is not anywhere on the account. So it's important before you submit a complaint on behalf of someone else, you actually need to be authorized to discuss that account or that mortgage or whatever the issue is on that person's behalf. If you don't have that level of authorization, if you're trying to assist someone who maybe just needs, you know, some data entry help or just isn't very comfortable with government processes or whatever the case may be, you may not want to submit on behalf of them. But instead, help them do the initial submission and kind of be, you know, be their fingertips as you type in the complaint, but not submit on behalf of them unless you were actually going to be on their account and really acting in their place throughout the process. Can I ask you one question, Darian that I suspect may come up... Yes. ...when we open for questions later. You mentioned advocate attorney and housing counselor. Are there any other choices that are closer to financial educator or financial advisor? Do you know offhand... That's a good question....or are those there - because those may not encapsulate some of the other types of people who might be working with... If memory serves that there's about seven or eight options. I don't recall what all of them are, but it's helpful for us to know if you're family or friend or attorney. Right. But there may even be another option in that space. Yes. But kind of really whatever best fits. It's more just for the benefit of us kind of having a general sense of, you know, whether we're getting all of the complaints from attorneys or getting all the complaints from family friends. I see. So it's not rigid. No definitely not. If they're not actually a housing counselor but are doing something like that, you may be able to... Choose a - just like grade school. Choose the option that best fits. Ready for the next slide? Yes. Okay. So I touched on a little bit of this about the importance of making sure the email address that you enter on the My Information section - that's the email address you'll use to log-in into the consumer portal. So once you're in the consumer portal, and this is whether you submit a complaint or for someone else, you'll be able to view the complaint you submitted, you'll be able to check the status of the complaint and you'll be able to review a0nd provide feedback about any company responses to the complaint. This would include any attachments. So it's important that that email address be a real email address that you can access and get updates on. Then the other thing I noted was that companies may require authorization to communicate with a consumer's representative before responding. So if you are submitting on behalf of someone else and truly in that role, then you'll want to make sure that you're authorized on that account or mortgage or whatever the case may be. And, as I indicated though, you could check the box to consent to publishing when submitting a complaint on behalf of someone else. Only consent directly given by consumer lets the CFPB publish their experience in the Consumer Complaint Database. So I just wanted to make those three highlights. Can I ask one other question again... Yes. ...possibly anticipating - so if you - if the written permission is required, that's something the company would always - already need to have the (still way) to sort of upload that here. Darian Dorsey: You can attach it at the same time. Irene Skricki: Okay. Darian Dorsey: It's just going to - then it will just depend on the company reviewing that. Irene Skricki: Okay. But it's always a good idea, you know, to be proactive in that space just to avoid some kind of cycle of, "Oh you're not authorized. Oh wait. Oh maybe you are." You know, it's good to kind of settle that before if you can. And I - one other question I think for, again, for a financial educator, do you - is it - are there reasons why it's better to submit on behalf versus having them do it themselves? Unless it was a function of whether you are in a position to play that follow up role, if you're likely to see them again. Right. Is there any other things people should think about in making that determination? Yes I think - that's a good question. I think it's really - it really depends on the depth of the relationship you have with the consumer. If they are your client and you are their, you know, their case worker or something akin to a case worker, then it may be appropriate to submit on behalf of - if you are really and truly acting in their place. You should almost think of this to some extent - it's almost like power of attorney level kind of ability to act on their behalf. You're going to have to review the company's response. You're going to have to dispute the company's response. You're going to have to provide any additional documentation. So you really want to be kind of - decide kind of - make a decision on whether you are really acting in that way or if you really just want to kind of assist someone of getting their complaint in at the front end of the process. Right. So you should do it cautiously. Right. And that's if - so only if you're very clear that you're going to have an ongoing relationship or feel that (like). Okay. Thank you. So once we've done that and submitted a complaint - and it's honestly taken me longer to describe submitting a complaint than it will probably take for you to submit a complaint. So that's a good thing. It's a fairly easy form and we're continually looking at ways to make it better. But it's a pretty straightforward process. You can attach attachments, for example, when you're doing that, when you're submitting a complaint and that can, you know, be a pretty quick process. But however we get the complaint whether it's through the Web or the phone or some other channel, we check for completeness and jurisdiction. We send it to the company. And if we can't send it to a company, then we can actually refer it to another regulator. So we have referral relationships. But that typically happens - we're typically able to send complaints to companies in under one day including weekends. And so it's a fairly quick process after you submit a complaint. Next slide. So once we've done that, the company has 15 days to respond to the consumer and to the CFPB. They have to use a secure Web portal to respond to us. And that means that they - their response is available through that consumer portal. So once they provide it in their secure portal, it's then available in the consumer portal as well. Companies are expected to respond within 15 days, but have up to 60 days to provide a final response. So some complaints, particularly in the mortgage space, may take longer than 15 days. But either way, they have to have let us and the consumer know that within 15 days that they are going to need up to 60 days. Next slide. So once the company responds, the consumer reviews the company's response including the steps taken to respond to the complaint, the communication to and from the consumer, the follow-up actions or planned follow-up actions, and at that point, can provide some feedback about that response. Should we look at the next slide? The feedback kind of comes, again, through that consumer portal that I talked about and is used to inform a whole host of kind of prioritization exercises that we do to try to understand which issues and companies and products we want to kind of focus our limited investigations resources on. So the last step - I'll talk a little bit about what happens after a consumer provides feedback. At that point, we analyze the consumer's feedback. We use it and a whole bunch of other information to try to identify market problems and consumer educational opportunities whether it's through that individual or just more broadly. We also report and share data with internal and external stakeholders. So we work very closely with our colleagues in supervision and enforcement as well as share information through government portals with federal and state regulators. We also push data into the Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Sentinel Network. And we also report rather frequently to Congress through an annual consumer response - a report to Congress from consumer response. As well as sizeable contributions to the Bureau's semi-annual reports to Congress along with some other reports that our other offices in - such as the Office of Servicemember Affairs, the Office of Students, the Office of Older Americans who also do reports on complaints. And I'll talk about the last one of these things, on the next slide, which is the Consumer Complaint Database. Something that you should really think of as a tool for finding out more about what kind of issues consumers are having. And what you'll see here is a screenshot on the landing page for the Consumer Complaint Database which was just updated on June 25 to include narratives. And what you'll see here is you'll see three options. And I like to think of these as, you know, easy, you know, medium and hard. So the thing on the left with the exclamation point, that's the easiest way. If you want to read narratives, you can click on Read Narratives there and be able to just quickly skim through and read narratives. The middle option to view, sort and filter data gives you the ability to see something that looks like an Excel spreadsheet and do some filtering. Many of the same functionality but just gives you all the complaints. So the first option gives you just the narratives that consumers have opted to share, and I believe last I checked this morning, it was about 12,000 complaint narratives are in the Complaint Database and this is only since June 25. So it's quite a few narratives have already been added to the Complaint Database. What percentage of the total complaints are doing narratives? So consumers are opting in - so it's only available over the Web. But for consumers that are submitting complaints over the Web, it's around 58% of consumers are opting to share their narratives through the Web. But again we do receive complaints through other channels and those don't have the same kind of consent. In the middle section here, you'll see the view, sort and filter data and that's again the Excel view. And then on the right-hand side you can see this is for people who want to export and use APIs and more sophisticated things. So depending on your level of data love, you can kind of move along from left to right to get more information. So I'll talk about, on the next slide, a little bit about how we put narratives in the Complaint Database. So protecting consumer's privacy is a priority. So we've published anonymized data about over 417,000 complaints on our Web site. So in addition to the ones that have narratives which is very recent, there are a total of 417,000 complaints in the Complaint Database. Since June 25, we've published about 12,000 narratives. And what we do is before we publish them, and only for those where the consumer opts in, we scrub out information that can be used to identify consumers. So if you were to look at some of those narratives, you would see x's where some kind of information that might be used to re-identify a consumer has been removed from the narratives. The other thing beyond kind of the importance of privacy is the idea that the database is available to the public. So, really, anyone could be interested in it. And the idea is that, you know, we know how valuable complaints are to CFPB and how much they inform our work. And we believe that they also can be very useful for other work. So companies can use it to see what products their competitors are putting out and what kind of complaints they're seeing. And they can use that to inform the products that they're developing. At the same time, researchers can look at it and see where there are patterns and trends by geography, by issue and so on. And kind of on down the line. Just think it's an important resource that can hopefully be helpful to the market. Again, consumers can opt-in to put the narrative in the Consumer Complaint Database. We remove sensitive information and personal identifiers. It's all scrubbed out. Whether a consumer opts in or doesn't has no impact whatsoever on how we handle the complaint. It moves through the process exactly the same way. And consumers also have the ability to withdraw consent at any time. They can just give us a call, let us know and the next time the database is updated we can remove that narrative. So I'll show you just a quick screengrab to hopefully get you intrigued and excited to go check out the Complaint Database. This is what happens if you click that left side option, the Read Narratives. You'd see something that looks an awful lot like this. And what you can see here is some really basic information. On the left side, you can find out when we got the complaint, the product, the sub-product, the issue, sub-issue, the state, the zip code and how we received it. So you can see these are both Web complaints, happened to be here at the top. In the middle section, you're actually going to see the consumer's complaint narrative. And this is in their own words submitted through the Web form. And here's where you can see a few of the x's that block out - in this case for the first one, they're giving us the last four digits of their checking and savings account. So it's pretty darn important that we take those out and our system does. And then you can actually see below that the company's public response. So companies are given an option, after they've responded to the complaint, to provide a public-facing response. And in this case - and in both of these cases, the company choose not to provide a public response. But it's their option. And in the far right-hand column, you can see the actual name of the company. The date we sent it to the company. So for these examples you can see the first complaint, I believe, we received on the 25th and it looks like maybe we sent it to the company on the 29th. So in just a couple of days, we sent it to the company. And then you can see how the company responded to the consumer. You can find out whether the company's response was timely, whether the consumer disputed it and for people who are kind of avid data users, you have a complaint ID number that's distinct from the one we use internally in our system for authentication reasons. But this enables you to kind of take data at one point in time, match it up to data later. So if you're interested to see how a complaint was, you know, kind of changed over time, you can see that information by matching the complaint IDs over time. So I want to just let you know about the types of reports that are available based on complaint data. I kind of touched on this earlier. But just last Thursday, I believe, if last Thursday was July 16 - it all kind of blurs together a bit. We issued our first ever monthly complaint report. In this report, you can find the top ten most complained about companies in the country as well as in this most recent one, there's a products focus which for July was debt collection. And there is a geographic focus which for July was Milwaukee. So every month around the middle of the month, we'll be issuing these reports, updating the most complained about companies, updating and giving a deeper dive into different products and into different geographies just to give people a sense of what we're seeing kind of over time. You'll also see that we have some other snapshots are available on our Web site. So information before the monthly complaint started coming out that we would periodically release a snapshot as well as additional reports. So, for example, a snapshot of debt collection complaints submitted by older consumers, by our Office of Older Americans. Our credit reporting complaint snapshot. A report on complaints from servicemembers, veterans, and their families by our Office of Servicemember Affairs. And so on kind of down the line. And older Americans and mortgage debt, reverse mortgage complaints, annual report of the ombuds and a mid-year snapshot of private student loan complaints. And all of this, I think, speaks to the fact that complaints are kind of a key part of a lot of work here at the Bureau. So submitting a complaint, you know, may or may not result in a particular outcome that a consumer desires. We hope it does. But either way complaints are really at the heart of what we do here and they're really important for our colleagues throughout the Bureau to really understand the issues that consumers are experiencing. So that they can inform supervision and enforcement rule-making and a host of other Bureau activities. So there's some real value in submitting a complaint just because it enables the Bureau to have some insight and now with the publication of narratives to give the public additional insight in to what consumers are experiencing. Right. I'm going to add something here which is that all of these reports are on our Web site. And then, if you go to the resource inventory, the report that I referenced at the very beginning which is also on our Web site -- resource inventory for financial educators -- we have summaries - we have both the list of these reports as well as short summaries. They're a few paragraphs. So you can read the highlights without having to read the entire report. And I think it's interesting the complaint system both allows consumers, obviously, to get their complaints heard and responded to, but a lot of this data really is a very nice way to see what's going on in the marketplace. It's actually quite interesting reading because the reports can be quite specific about the specific types of challenges that folks are facing around, you know, mortgage debt and student loans. And so, they're actually interesting reading I think for someone working with consumers to see what types of things other consumers are facing. So I do encourage folks to look at that. And, again, those are all available on our Web site. One note - two of them are not in our inventory because they're so new. The monthly complaint report and also the servicemembers one was updated just recently. And so our inventory doesn't have those, but they are on the Web site and we will update the inventory fairly soon. So I think we just have contact information now. Mm-hm. How to reach Consumer Response and the CFPB generally. All right. So now we'll turn to questions. So oh (Kathy) the Operator, we're going to take questions now from folks. So you can both submit a question through the Q&A function which you should see at the top of your Webinar screen if you're in the Webinar software. Or if you want to ask by phone, (Kathy) will remind you how to do that. All right. And if you do want to ask a question by the phone, please press the star 1 and please record your name. And to withdraw your question on the phone, it's star 2. Once again star 1 on the phone to ask a question. Thank you. And right now I don't have any emailed questions and I know those of you who weren't able to use the Webinar software can't do that. I will ask a question while we're waiting. Can you tell us a little bit about what the - of the 600 - what 675,000 or so complaints that have been received, what has happened to those complaints in terms of the resolutions for consumers? I know there are some percentages around that. Sure. So one of the big things that our process can deliver is the ability to get a response. So of the 650,000 complaints, some complaints we refer to other agencies, right, because they're better able to handle them. They're not about a product or service that's in our coverage or they're about a bank under $10 billion, for example. So there's some number of those that they go off to other regulators. But there are - you know, over 400,000 consumers have received responses from companies that, in many cases, address their concerns. There's a lot of different things that can come in a response and one of the things that we've always said to companies is that we don't place a particular value on one response over the other. It's rather more important that it actually is tailored to what the consumer needs. So in some cases, it's resulted in monetary relief. So that can be anything, you know, such as returned late fees or it could be something, you know, much larger than that. It just really depends on the consumer's specific situation. But monetary relief is sometimes possible. But in many cases it's not really what's appropriate or what the consumers are asking for. So a consumer that's looking for a modification on their mortgage isn't going to find a $100 gift card to be terribly, you know, a valuable relief. So there's is also non-monetary relief. So the refinancing of a mortgage or a modification can have a lot of great value for consumers. So we've seen some consumers have outcomes like those. In addition, we also have a good number of complaints where companies have provided an explanation. So not surprising to anyone in the financial education community, there's a lot of confusion around how products and services work. And so a lot of consumers have gotten explanations where they hadn't really gotten clear explanations before. They're now getting them in writing which has some value, as you might imagine, to be able to actually read in plain language, we hope, the company's explanation which maybe it's some financial education information that should have been provided initially, but nonetheless is provided now. And so, we've really seen, kind of, it really spans the whole gambit of different types of resolution and relief. What I will say is that of company responses, only about 20% of company responses have been disputed. So that means that, you know, the vast majority of consumers - well so they may not have gotten exactly what they like, they felt like the response that they got from the company more or less met their needs. At least so much as they didn't feel the need to dispute the company's response. Actually I'll just - there was actually a very loosely related question that came in online which says a consumer has a complaint regarding Capital One, should they file with the OCC and the CFPB? I - is that a function of what the product is? So one of the things that's in Dodd-Frank is this concept - and 1034 for those who don't have it committed to memory. In 1034, it talks about the fact that the Bureau has to stand at this function, which wound up being the Office of Consumer Response, to be the centralized place for complaints about consumer financial products and services. And that's really how you should think of us. We'd actually prefer if you not submit complaints to multiple regulators. The result being - in the case of a Capital One complaint, we would receive the complaint. OCC would also receive the complaint. OCC would do data entry. Then OCC would let us know we had the complaint. And then we'd go into OCC's system and then take their data entry complaint, put it into our system and merge it with the other complaint. So definitely, we have strong preference for starting with the CFPB. If we are not the right place, we will absolutely get it to the right place. But we operate at a very large scale, handling over 20,000 complaints a month. And so we are really well situated to take as much as people can give us. But it is much more laborious to kind of refer complaints back and forth between agencies. So. Fantastic if you start with us and we'll make sure that if we're not the right place, we'll get it to the right place. Great. Aree there any phone questions that have come in? We do have one. Go ahead and ask your question please. Hello. During the presentation, I think you said that there's certain complaints that aren't able to be sent to the company. Can you elaborate on that? Sure. So one of the things that's important in being able to send a complaint to a company is kind of having complete information which is fairly straightforward. But I usually kind of joke that the same, you know, the same kids that didn't put their names on their paper in the third grade, they grew up. We do occasionally get complaints from consumers where they don't have their name on them or their address or any other information. This particularly happens with things like mail or fax. So, occasionally, we get things like that. They're just really incomplete. We also sometimes get complaints where the consumer doesn't know who they're complaining about. And so, this can happen, for example, in the debt collection space where they know they're getting calls at all hours of the day and night, but they can't identify who the person is which is a strong indication of a scam. And it's one of the types of complaints that we would, for example, send to the FTC for inclusion in the Sentinel Database because it's not a complaint that we could send to a company. Those are the most common, but it also includes complaints as I indicated for, you know, in the example of a credit union that was under $10 billion in assets. Those complaints we would refer to the National Credit Union Administration for them to handle those complaints. So there are a broad range of things that can kind of go into that bucket, but you can think of it as things that are incomplete, things that can't be tagged to a company, and things that otherwise, you know, kind of have that sort of scam element are sent along to FTC Sentinel. So that's kind of what makes up the difference between what we've handled in total and what we've been able to get responses to. But, in general, companies - of the complaints that we've sent to companies for response, 98% of those complaints have been responded to in a timely manner. I assume that there are cases when the company can't figure out if the - so the customer - this is not our customer or... Right. ...you know, we can't match this person. Yes. Does the consumer then have an opportunity to update the complaint or what happens in this case? It's - there is a process for that but that is - it's definitely one of the very small kind of edge cases where that happens. But, in general, companies are expected to save any record or any kind of plausible belief that this consumer might be a customer of theirs. So if someone, for example, submitted a complaint about advertising, we would expect that the company respond if that's their advertising whether they have a record of that customer or not. That type of thing. So it's not very common. And you can actually see in our annual report to Congress, there's actually a breakdown of those types of categories of response. So if you're curious about what percentage those are. But it's very - a very small percentage of things fall into that bucket. The vast majority of complaints can be sent to companies and the very vast majority of the time, companies provide responses and provide timely responses. Okay. Are there other phone questions? Yes. Hello? Can you hear me? Yes we can. Okay. Good afternoon. I am not - I might want you to reiterate, if you would, what would be something that would make sense for a complaint. Last night, I had clients that I was coaching and we were talking to one of their credit card companies and they were indicating that they had a Collections Department, but they would not put us through to them. The client repeated over and over again that she was suffering financial hardship and needed to speak to someone in Collections in order to work out a payment plan. We were told repeatedly that they did not have it. So she authorized me to do the talking. When I got on the line, I was, again, told that they would not give us the Collections Department number even though - at one point they said they had a Collections Department and another it made it sound - and then at another point it made it sound like they had a third-party collections. Yes. Then what happened is that the person went offline about ten minutes when I said, "Have you ever heard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?" Yes. They came back on and I'm confident it was the same person but talking with a bit of a different accent and knocked off $105. But they still were telling her she has to pay an exorbitant amount and - they wouldn't work with us. It was ridiculous. Sure. So I will say that not everyone is enamored of our definition of complaint. However, it is the definition that's very consistent with the other regulators. And I would say - I would kind of pose to you if you're thinking about that interaction, you experienced it. So there's that. So yes that's true. There's definitely a company involved. And I would say it's fair to say from your interaction, you're dissatisfied. Yes. That's the definition of a complaint. Yes. You know, it's - you'd kind of - it meets the sort of standard definition. Your client - and it sounds like you both are, you know, have an expression of dissatisfaction with an experience you had with that company. And that's a perfect example of something that could be a complaint. And, again, sometimes complaining to us much like sometimes mentioning our name, can get companies to maybe pause, take a look and think about how they want to address that concern. So, you know, if you feel like it's a continuing issue and you still need resolution, I think that that sounds like the kind of thing you might want to submit a complaint about. Thank you. I will discuss it with the client. Thank you. Wonderful. Okay. We have another emailed question here which says, "Have you found that companies that out to scam consumers have diminished their scams as a result of the CFPB oversight?" So I can't speak entirely to scams. Just not my area of expertise. But what I can say is we have heard from companies about changes that they are making. Some of them they've told us. Some of them have been in the press. We have heard of companies that are hiring executive level - so - and their very senior executives are hiring people dedicated to focusing on complaints. We have seen stuff like that. We've also heard of executives having their bonuses tied to complaint performance and the public Consumer Complaint Database and how they do relative to their peers. We've also heard of companies who have done things like, you know, that phone tree. So when you call a phone number and you get kind of stuck in a loop of press 0 and then press 4 and then hope you don't have to figure out what's next, right? That whole loop? We've actually been told that some companies, to avoid complaints coming to the CFPB, are actually shortening that process and trying not to kind of do so much run-around because they would rather address their consumers' issues than have their consumers come to us which we would tend to share that we would rather have them address their consumer issues than have to come to us as well. So I can't speak specifically to scams, but I do know at least some anecdotal - have anecdotal evidence around complaints which is my area that companies are paying attention and taking some actions to better address consumer complaints. I'm going to jump in with another question myself... Yes. Go ahead. ...as moderator. What do we do when we - I assume that sending the complaint to the company requires the portal connection, right, you mentioned. What happens when we can't find them? Are there companies that haven't signed up? Do they have to sign up? How does that work? So we have over 3000 companies not including affiliates. So affiliates would make that number even larger. But over 3000 companies have boarded to the company portal. Again, by and large, we've been able to find companies if they are actual legitimate companies. And, by and large, companies have been willing to kind of cooperate without kind of any additional process. It's a simple process for them to provide some basic information then we set them up with a portal. Provide them with a manual and some training so they know how to use it. But for the most part, we've really had a lot of success there. I will say one of the challenges that I know that the Federal Trade Commission has dealt with for many years is scams. So things that may seem like legitimate businesses - that's really not our area and that's why we send those complaints to the Federal Trade Commission. We don't have coverage over scams in quite that same way. And so our model of complaint handling is about sending a complaint to a company. And if we can't because it's not a real company or they're kind of a fly-by-night operation, then that's something that we put into the FTC Sentinel Network for law enforcement - state, federal and international law enforcement. Do you have a sense of the percentage of complaints about companies that turn out to be handed over for that reason? It's fairly low. In the debt collection space, it's higher. But it's very low in your bank spaces and in many of your non-bank spaces. But in your debt collection that's where we see more complaints where we are not able to identify the company and (unintelligible) and send it along for inclusion in the Sentinel. Okay. Great. Are there other phone questions? Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. Excellent. I have something I went through recently and I'm just curious if you're getting a lot of complaints about this subject. When you purchase an item with a major credit card, it gets charged right away. However, when you return something or something in addition ends up on your credit card, it takes days if not over a week for it to come off your credit card. Yet they're holding up your line of credit. Have you guys gotten a lot of complaints about that? You know, I'm not entirely up-to-speed on the exact numbers we're seeing in credit cards, but what I would say is one of the really cool features about the Consumer Complaint Database is the ability to search. So you can actually go there and do word searches. It's just right up that - once you click on any of those options, you can go up there and search through them and see if we're seeing more of that. It may be an issue that we see some of. I know that the top issue for credit cards is billing disputes. I don't know. You know, it really kind of depends on how a consumer views that. Whether they decide that that's a billing dispute or some other kind of issue. But it might be something just to kind of test drive the Consumer Complaint Database and see if others are complaining about it. But I know that the - I believe over a 1/3 of our credit card complaints are about billing disputes. Okay. Thank you. Okay. And we have a question. Hi. Why is - do you know the statistics on the rate of companies allowing their responses to consumers to be published? Oh I have not done a breakout of that. So let me - and this is may be part of your question. So one of things is when we send a complaint to the company for a response that response is not optional, right? So we send that complaint and then they have to provide that response which can be close of monetary relief, close of non-monetary relief, so on down the line. That is not really up to them. That is published. Where they do have an option is if they want to provide an additional optional public company response. And we have not seen - it kind of varies by product and varies by industry and varies by whether you're a bank or a non-bank. But some companies are using it. I don't have the latest and greatest numbers on it, but some companies are using that optional public response. But they don't have discretion about the response that - at least the category of response that they provided the consumer. That's not up to them. We publish that as part of publishing the complaint. Okay thanks. Quick follow-up. Were you an appropriate venue for CRA-related complaints? It depends. I'm assuming you mean Community Reinvestment Act? Yes. As - I think if it's related to a financial product or service - if that's the kind of the - the issue is if something you think is a CRA issue but I don't think - if it's just the CRA or just some very CRA-specific thing, but I don't think that that's us. Yes. I mean, generally, kind of - a lot of CRA is around business and is around lending not to individuals. So that - we don't cover that like that type of - probably the service test which is the piece that deals with how they're serving individuals maybe. But I - your point is that if they decide to send it us, we will get it to them, right? Right. And I think, yes. And I think it really is, is does it fit into one of those product buckets? So you think there's a CRA issue? Is it a specific - it's really about that definition of a complaint. It's about a consumer's experience with a company. So if the issue is a single consumer which is a little hard to imagine for Community Reinvestment Act, but I am very rusty on my Community Reinvestment Act. But if probably not a single consumer has an issue with a company that's a CRA issue. It's probably more - it sounds like maybe more of a systemic observation and I don't think that we are the - necessarily the right place for broad CRA complaints. Thank you. Mm-hm. Do we have any other questions? No. There are no other questions at this time. Okay great. Well we're down to just a couple of minutes anyway. So I think - oh wait, it looks like we have - we may have one more coming in. No. Apparently not. Okay. Well great. Well this has been - I found it really interesting. Lots of interesting stuff here. And again, so thank you everyone for joining us today. This Webinar was also recorded. So you can - we will display it on our Web site in a week or two. We'll send out an email to FinEx participants to let them know when that is available. And, obviously, we urge everyone to use our resources, look at our resources, check out some of the reports we talked about today, and absolutely use the Submit a Complaint function. I think it will be a great resource for a lot of you and your clients. So thank you very much. Let us know if you have any questions. And I think this is the end of the Webinar. Thanks everyone. Thank you. This completes today's conference. You may disconnect at this time.