Research and reports

This report provides results from the CFPB 2019 Tax Time Saving Cohort and information on how the receipt of a tax refund is a unique opportunity for many taxpayers to Start Small and Save Up.

The CFPB researched the childhood origins of financial capability and well-being to identify those roots and to find promising practices and strategies to support their development.

The 2019 annual report of the CFPB Private Education Loan Ombudsman covers two years of data, discusses the importance of complaint analysis, and addresses unscrupulous student loan debt relief companies.    

This research brief is intended to help stakeholders understand how the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) financial literacy data about the U.S. may be used to identify effective approaches to financial education and better define the metrics for success.

Spring 2019 Semi-Annual Report of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

This report describes the background screening industry and developments in the market. While background screening reports can include various types of information and be used for several purposes, this paper focuses on reports used for employment purposes that include criminal history information.

Quarterly consumer credit trends reports focus on a specific consumer financial product or issue using a longitudinal, nationally-representative sample of de-identified credit records maintained by a nationwide credit reporting company.

In this issue of Supervisory Highlights, we report examination findings in the areas of automobile loan origination, credit card account management, debt collection, furnishing, and mortgage origination that were generally completed between December 2018 and March 2019 (unless otherwise stated). The report does not impose any new or different legal requirements, and all violations described in the report are based only on those specific facts and circumstances noted during those examinations. 

This report presents results from a joint research study between the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Credit Karma. The purpose of the study is to examine how consumers’ subjective financial well-being relates to objective measures of consumers’ financial health, specifically, consumers’ credit report characteristics. The study also seeks to relate consumers’ subjective financial well-being to consumers’ engagement with financial information through educational tools. 

A large study exploring tax-time saving found that early messaging and small incentives were effective at encouraging some customers to save using a savings feature on their prepaid card.