The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is doing invaluable work to make the markets for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products and services fairer and more transparent. And once again, the financial industry is going all-out to block those efforts.

The industry’s latest threat involves a proposal to make the CFPB’s complaint system more useful and user-friendly by giving consumers the right to include the specifics of their complaints in a searchable public database.

Please join us in telling the CFPB: Don’t back down from your proposal to let consumers share their stories publicly.

Hundreds of thousands of people have used the CFPB’s complaint system, and more than 30,000 cases have already resulted in monetary relief. Complaint data also helps the CFPB detect and respond to broader patterns of industry error or misconduct. The complaint system could be far more valuable, though, if consumers had the option of publicly describing their bad experiences. That way, consumers would be able to learn about the experiences of others and make more informed choices, and financial companies would have an added incentive to compete by actually trying to satisfy their customers, not by trying to put something over on them.

But financial companies, just as they fought the creation of the CFPB in the first place, are fighting its complaint proposal tooth and nail – through the press, through lobbying, and through a highly deceptive advertising campaign in which the industry falsely claims that businesses would not have an equal right to post their responses.

That’s why we need to fight back.  Urge the CFPB to stand firm and help consumers share their experiences and hold big banks accountable.

Speak up today, because the big banks are working feverishly hard to take away our chance to speak up in the future.

Thank you for your continued support for real financial reform.

Sincerely,

Lisa Donner
Executive Director
Americans for Financial Reform