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Episode Description
In this episode of Financial Forward, host Jim McCarthy sits down with John McNamara, former Principal Assistant Director for Markets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Together, they pull back the curtain on how complaint data actually powered markets, supervision, and enforcement inside the Bureau—and what that means for state regulators today.
Jim and John walk through the evolution of the CFPB complaint system, the value of normalized and validated data, and how the CFPB Regulator Portal gives states access to “full jacket” complaints, not just what appears in the public database. They also look at a live example from Texas, using McCarthy Hatch’s FSAi model to identify violations of state law within CFPB complaints.
If you’re a state regulator, a bank or credit union compliance leader, or anyone trying to get real signal out of noisy complaint data, this conversation is a playbook for using the tools you already have—but probably aren’t using to their full potential.
In This Episode, We Cover
- How the CFPB actually used complaint data
- How complaints fed the Bureau’s markets, supervision, and enforcement work
- Why John saw complaints as a strategic asset, not just customer service escalation
- The importance of normalized, comparable data across products, companies, and time
- Inside the CFPB State / Regulator Portal
- The evolution from the original state portal to today’s Regulator Portal
- How state agencies can use the portal and API to access full-jacket complaints, including attachments and richer fields than the public database
- Why the boarding and validation process for companies matters for anyone using CFPB complaint data
- What makes this data so powerful for states
- Using complaints as an early-warning system for new products, new players, and emerging harms
- Spotting velocity and direction of change—not just counting volume
- How complaint patterns can surface “outsized harm” from relatively small or new entities
- Texas case study with FSAi
- Jim walks through Texas CFPB complaints from January–July
- How the FSAi model isolates potential Texas state law violations from public CFPB complaints
- What it means when only a small percentage of complaints contain clear violations—but those are exactly the ones that matter most for deployment of investigative resources
- Practical takeaways for state regulators
- How to stop treating complaints as a back-office obligation and start treating them as front-end intelligence
- Ways to align complaint data with supervisory and enforcement strategy
- How to “put wind at your back” by sending investigators out with data-informed priorities rather than hunches
- Why industry should care too
- How banks and other financial firms can use complaint data and the CFPB system as a market research and risk management tool, not just a regulatory requirement
- The idea of each company having a complaint fingerprint—and what it means when that fingerprint changes
Guest Bio – John McNamara
John McNamara is the former Principal Assistant Director for Markets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where
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