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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau works to ensure that financial companies comply with fair consumer treatment regulations. The agency’s primary function is to ensure that lenders and banks aren’t able to take advantage of consumers without accountability.
Complaint Management and Archival
Consumers who are experiencing problems with financial services or products are permitted to reach out the agency directly to report their problem. In addition to being available for direct appeals, the agency also hosts a directory of public consumer complaints about various companies.
With the directory, consumers can get a window of insight into a company’s patterns of substandard consumer treatment before becoming a victim themselves.
Core Functions
The agency formally categorizes its service to consumers into three distinct areas: consumer empowerment, regulation enforcement, and financial education.
The agency works to empower consumers not only by answering questions and creating tools, but also by equipping them with lifestyle habits that are conducive to stable financial management.
To enforce the fair consumer treatment regulations, the agency actively takes action against financial institutions that violate them. In the best case scenario, the agency can arrange for a victimized consumer that consults them to be satisfactorily compensated for their mistreatment.
The Agency as an Information Resource
The agency not only works to provide consumers with a resource of defense against mistreatment, but also serves as an index of answers to the more complicated financial questions that consumers may have. Consumers who visit the agency’s website have the ability to get questions about mortgages, credit scores, and other general money-related issues answered.
Hands-on Consultation
Beyond empowerment and enforcement, the the agency also specializes consultation for financial goals and decisions. Consumers may use the agency as both a resource of answers for general inquiries and also for guidance on specific, contextual questions regarding highly specific financial decisions.
To facilitate a potentially easier time weighing the subtle pros and cons of potential financial decisions, the agency offers a number of specialized tools that can be used at no cost.
Some of the significant financial decisions that consumers reach out to agency for consultation for include college funding, home ownership, and retirement planning.
Independent Research
At the same time that it actively handles consumer grievances, the agency also monitors the financial market. Ideally, the agency’s live focus on the financial market can enable it to give consumers ample forewarning of the most potentially concerning challenges on the horizon.
In a similar fashion to the manner in which it displays consumer complaints, the agency also makes a point to monitor the reviews that consumers leave for various financial products. By looking over its product reviews, consumers may be able to make more educated choices on which to invest in.
Record of Service
In the time that it has operated, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has managed to provide over $11.4 million in relief to mistreated consumers. To date, the agency has provided its services to over 25 million consumers. There have been over 900,000 complaints issued to the agency to date, and on average, 97% of consumers are responded to promptly.
Conclusion
The agency is essentially a counterweight to the potential that predatory financial institutions have to exploit the consumer. Through education, enforcement and empowerment, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can both fight for consumers and offer them resources to better protect themselves.
