How to file a complaint
Before you start
AllBankComplaints.com does not accept complaints or fix problems with banks — this site only studies complaints that other people have already filed. Filing a complaint is a free, official government process run by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and it is completely separate from this site. The official starting point is consumerfinance.gov/complaint. Read through the steps below so you know what the official process involves before you begin.
The process
First, you submit your complaint to the CFPB with details about what happened. Next, the CFPB routes your complaint to the company involved, or to another agency if the CFPB is not the right one to handle it. The company then responds, typically within 15 days. Many complaints, with your consent and after personal information is removed, are later published in the CFPB's public Consumer Complaint Database, which is the same database this whole site is built on, and afterward there is a 60-day period where you can review the company's response and give feedback on it.
What to expect
CFPB says submitting a complaint online usually takes less than 10 minutes, while submitting by phone takes about 25 to 30 minutes. After you submit, the company typically responds within 15 days. That response window is the normal next step, so you do not need to resubmit through AllBankComplaints.com or anywhere else while you wait for the company to reply.
Where the complaint goes after that
If you give consent, and after the CFPB removes your personal information, your complaint may be added to the public Consumer Complaint Database. That can include the written narrative you submit describing what happened, without your personal details. This site's rankings, company pages, and word clouds are all built from that same public database. In that sense, filing a complaint is itself a way of contributing to the public record that helps other consumers see patterns.
What's associated with a more complete response
Generating that section through the required Muse Spark pipeline with strict fact checks.Across the full public complaint database, complaints closed with a written narrative describing what happened resulted in 'Closed with monetary relief' 2.57% of the time, compared with 0.9% for those closed without a narrative — about 2.9x higher. By submission channel, complaints submitted via the Web resulted in monetary relief 0.99% of the time, compared with 7.0% via Phone and 3.68% via Postal mail. Timely-response rates were consistently high regardless of channel, at 99.43% for Web, 97.98% for Phone, and 98.46% for Postal mail. These are correlations across a huge public dataset, not results from a controlled experiment, and complaint type and complexity likely explain some of the channel difference, not the channel itself. They show patterns only and are not a guarantee for any individual complaint, so writing a narrative or picking a particular channel does not definitely cause a better outcome.
Based on outcomes across all 17,651,431 complaints in the public CFPB database, computed directly against that data — not a guess. See How it works.
What a typical complaint includes
This section is generated from the local bulk complaint database and hasn't been built yet — see How it works.