CFPB Data Analytics Update
Recently, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released its Summer 2013 Supervisory Highlights, which provides details on its review of mortgage servicing at both banks and non-banking entities over the past two years. In particular, the CFPB has focused on:
Mortgage servicing transfers
Payment processing
Loss mitigation
What the data tells us about mortgage complaints
Accounting for over 70,000 complaints in the CFPB database as of August 12, 2013, mortgage complaints represent over half of the total complaints in the database, higher than any other product area. We analyzed this data to see if there were any lessons for mortgage lenders, and here’s what we found:
Biggest pain points: Loan servicing and payments
Diving into the data, we see that the majority of all mortgage complaints were about “loan modification, collection, and foreclosure” (the blue bars in the graph below). However, the CFPB is often most interested in cases where banks admitted fault and owe customers financial restitution. If we look at the cases that resulted in monetary relief to customers (the red bars), we see that “loan servicing, payments, escrow account” were the most prevalent types of complaints. This finding aligns with the CFPB’s focus on servicing and payments in their Summer Highlights report.