Blog

A message from the Chair of the Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law on the Taskforce report, public engagement, and a path forward.

The Bureau’s new Office of Innovation is proposing a “Disclosure Sandbox” to give companies leeway to test new disclosures or delivery methods that may better serve consumers.

We are proud to unveil a new seal for the Bureau that aligns us with the official seals of other federal financial services regulators.

Today, we’re announcing that this fellowship, formerly known as the Louis D. Brandeis Honors Attorney Program, will be renamed the Joseph Story Honors Attorney Program.

In observance of six years serving consumers, here are six ways the CFPB has made consumers count. 

Take control of your financial life with these ten tools that can help you make choices at the grocery store, pay your credit card bill, and deal with debt. They can also prepare you for money decisions like buying a home or figuring out how to pay for college.

Learn about the five financial products and services we’ve received the most complaints about in the last 5 years. Check out the resources we’ve created to help you understand credit cards, debt collection, mortgages, credit reports, banking accounts, and more.

In the past five years, we have written rules, enforced laws and, supervised banks and other financial companies, while at the same time creating resources to educate and engage you to make informed choices with your finances. 

To protect and help consumers in the financial marketplace, we set priorities to ensure that we tackle the most troubling problems using the best mix of tools available. Today we provided an overview of these goals to the members of our Consumer Advisory Board, and we’d like to share them with you.

We participated in multiple National Day of Civic Hacking events this year, with CFPB staff attending events in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Oakland, Calif. and Burlington, Vt. During the event, participants provided input on our CFPB Owning a Home website and analyzed our public Consumer Complaint Database and our public Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Database.

Since 2011, we have secured over $10.8 billion dollars in relief for more than 25 million consumers harmed by illegal practices.

If you believe you have the right to free, unbiased financial information, you are not alone – because at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we agree. It’s our job to provide you with reliable, trustworthy information about the consumer financial marketplace. So, in the past four years we’ve worked hard creating online tools to inform your financial decisions that are truly free – no charges, no ads, no referral fees.

Listening to and elevating your voice matters to us because we are a federal agency devoted to protecting consumers. When you speak up, you offer invaluable insight into the financial products and services consumers depend on. Telling us about your experiences helps us to better serve you and make the financial marketplace work for Americans.

While our doors have only been open for a short time, our work is helping to create a financial marketplace that works for you. We’re listening to your experiences through the complaints you submit, creating new consumer protections for financial products and services, holding bad actors accountable for breaking the rules, and developing useful tools and resources to empower you to make informed financial decisions. Learn more about how we’re working for you.

We officially opened our doors on July 21, 2011—three years ago today. Since then, we’ve used a range of tools in our toolbox to protect consumers: writing rules of the road, supervising and enforcing those rules, responding to consumer complaints, and much more. Here’s a look at our work so far by the numbers.

Every complaint helps us in our work to supervise companies, enforce federal consumer financial laws, and write better rules and regulations. You speaking up gives us important insight into the issues you face as a consumer, so thank you!

Read more here.

A message from Director Cordray

On consumerfinance.gov/es, you can find answers, in plain-language Spanish, to consumers’ most common questions. It’s also our first responsive site – it works beautifully on mobile devices as well as on desktops – in response to research that shows two-thirds of Latinos who are online tend to access the Internet from a mobile device. Read more about our tools in Spanish.

Rich Cordray, the new Director of the CFPB, has recorded a message about the extraordinary privilege he sees in working on behalf of American consumers.

Today, I was appointed by President Obama to serve as the first Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I am honored by this opportunity to continue my work on behalf of consumers. And I am energized by the responsibilities and challenges facing the Bureau. The importance of this day has less to do with […]

As the nation’s first federal agency focused on consumer financial protection, we have been hard at work putting procedures and mechanisms in place to protect you from unfair, deceptive, and abusive financial practices.

We’ve been taking your complaints on credit cards at the CFPB since we officially opened for business on July 21, 2011. Today, we released an interim report on credit card complaints.

Today, the CFPB released the CFPB Supervision and Examination Manual, the guide for our examiners to use in overseeing companies that provide consumer financial products and services.

Yesterday, Raj Date spoke in Philadelphia about the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis for the consumer bureau. Before taking questions from the audience, Mr. Date, Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury, outlined three basic themes for our work.