Inside the CFPB: An Open Data Demo for Journalists

Why It Matters

Open CFPB data equips reporters and regulators to expose predatory financial practices, driving accountability and informing policy decisions.

Key Takeaways

• CFPB complaint data includes verified customer narratives and response timestamps
• Users can export full dataset as CSV for immediate analysis
• Narrative search reveals hidden issues like public housing or AI bots
• CFPB receives ~5 million complaints annually, far outpacing other agencies
• Journalists leverage data to expose tribal lenders and predatory practices

Summary

The session titled “Inside the CFPB: An Open Data Demo for Journalists” featured Erie Mayer, the bureau’s first chief technologist, and ProPublica data reporter Joel Jacobs. They walked journalists through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) publicly available datasets, emphasizing the agency’s open‑source software policy, the comprehensive consumer‑complaint database, and the separate credit‑card‑rate inventory. Key insights highlighted the complaint workflow: consumers file a complaint, the company confirms the relationship, and the bureau publishes the case with timestamps showing company responses—often within the same day. The data can be downloaded instantly as CSV files, and the narrative field is searchable, allowing users to uncover trends by using everyday language such as “milk,” “human,” or “teacher.” Erie noted that 98% of complaints receive a timely response, and the bureau processes roughly five million complaints a year, dwarfing other regulators. Examples illustrated the power of flexible searches: a query for “public housing” surfaced a single complaint that revealed a debt‑collector’s practices; “human” uncovered complaints about AI chatbots; and a “teacher” search exposed issues with federal student‑loan servicers. Joel shared how he used the same dataset to trace predatory tribal lenders charging 600% interest, linking multiple shell companies to a single tribe. The broader implication is that open, granular data empowers journalists, state attorneys general, and consumer advocates to identify systemic abuses and push for enforcement, even as internal CFPB supervisory actions remain hamstrung by a court‑ordered stand‑down. By democratizing access, the bureau’s data serves as a critical watchdog tool for financial‑industry transparency.

Original Description

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession, provides federal oversight of consumer financial products and services.

It’s also a rich source of data on consumer complaints, consumer credit trends, credit card agreements and much more — and it’s critical for any journalist covering personal finance and consumer issues to understand how and why to dig into CFPB data.

This hourlong, hands-on demo features Erie Meyer, who served as the CFPB’s first chief technologist from 2021 to 2025. Meyer also played a pivotal role in launching the U.S. Digital Service at the White House, served as senior director at Code for America, and has held key positions at the Federal Trade Commission.

In this demo, you’ll also hear from Joel Jacobs, a data reporter at ProPublica who has written stories on eroding consumer protections under the second Trump administration, and high-interest loans from Tribal lenders, which relied on CFPB complaint data.

By the end of this demo you’ll gain a better grasp of:

- The range of CFPB data offerings.

- How to get the data and analyze it.

- How to turn CFPB data into stories that have an impact.

Clark Merrefield, senior editor at The Journalist’s Resource, moderates.