The Office of Consumer Protection financial accepts consumer complaints about various financial services, including credit card companies. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and Consumer Protection 2010 created the CFPB to help protect consumers regarding financial institutions. The CFPB helps facilitate communication between consumers and financial institutions to get the problems resolved.
How does the CFPB?
Once the customer files a complaint with the CFPB, they contact the credit card company, which has 15 days to answer the complaint and 60 days to solve the problem unless it is a complicated complaint. The CFPB then records how the credit card issuer has resolved the problem (or if they do not respond to the complaint), and transmits this information to government agencies that oversee financial products and services.
Since the CFPB started it two years ago, there were 27.251 credit card complaints filed with the agency. Out of all the credit cards in circulation in the United States, it seems like a relatively small percentage of complaints.
So are all credit card complaints go through the CFPB? Not many people do not know about the CFPB and they tend to contact their credit card companies individually if they have a complaint, and such complaints are not tracked by the CFPB. However, their data gives an interesting look at not only the number of people who complain, but what exactly consumers complain.
What credit card issuers have the most complaints?
Although the number of complaints each credit card issuer receives is interesting, it does not tell the whole history. For example, Chase has nearly 80 million of other outstanding credit cards in the United States that Barclay, so of course, they will have more complaints because they have far more people who use their credit cards .
So we pulled the Nilson Report data on the number of credit cards each transmitter was outstanding and compared that against the number of complaints the CFPB reported for each transmitter. Based on these data, CitiBank, which has more than 53 million of outstanding credit cards, the highest rate of complaints issued by credit card. Discover, which has about 48 million cards in circulation, had the best ratio, with only 1,294 complaints. Chase, who has the most cards in circulation 88 million, also had one of the lowest complaint rate cards, like American Express.
[See how we ranked individual credit cards based on rewards and features.]
What credit card complaints are the most common?
The CFPB follows the different types of complaints, giving us an idea of what are the most common complaints that people have credit cards. We examined all the complaints of 30 November 2011 to 31 October 2013 at an idea whose complaints were most often. You might assume that the customer service or hidden fees perhaps the most common complaints about credit cards, but the actual list may surprise you.
1. billing disputes: With 16 percent of complaints filed with the CFPB, this was by far the biggest complaint, which is very surprising. What is surprising is the reason most people file complaints about their billing. According to the CFPB, many people who complained were confused by the billing process their credit card lender, or do not realize that they had just 60 days to dispute billing costs. This is stated in the Terms and Conditions for more credit card lender, but most people do not take the time to read these.
2. APR or interest rate: Complaints about RAA or interest rates accounted for about 9 percent of the total number of complaints to the CFPB. These reports were mostly consumers who do not understand how their APRs and interest rates have worked or were frustrated when their interest rates were raised.
3. Identity Theft / Fraud: So it is surprising that identity theft is so far down the list of complaints (representing 7 percent of all complaints) it is logical since identity theft is to have a meteoric rise in recent years. The problem is that most people do not know what to do when they are victims of identity theft. (Here are some tips on what to do if you are a victim.) Contact your credit card company is a good first step, but there are a number of other steps you need to go before the situation can be resolved.
4. Closing Account: While closing an account can often be difficult when dealing with a credit card issuer that will not let you go, he is surprising that so many consumers (6.6 percent) seem to have a problem with the closure of their accounts.
5. Credit Reporting: Each credit card issuer can choose how they report your account to the different credit bureaus, making it an easy area for misunderstandings and misinformation to arise. Either consumers have been shocked by how their accounts were reported to credit bureaus or there were errors in their credit reports that have been made by credit card issuers. Either way, an easy way to see what is in your credit report and if there are errors is to sign up for a credit report monitoring service to systematically review how your credit card lenders report the your account information.
Other complaints were top balance transfer problem to complications with fees and other common financial issues, but these five categories were by far the top five most common complaints met with the CFPB by consumers, which gives us an interesting insight on what irritates most credit card holders when it comes to their credit cards.