About ComplaintRate
ComplaintRate was built by Ashley Nicholls, a UK-based independent researcher and founder of Asymmetry Data Ltd.
I don't have a background in US banking — which is part of why this project exists. The data the CFPB publishes is a public good, but in its raw form it's nearly unreadable: fourteen years of records, millions of entries, no normalisation, no entity resolution, no way to compare a regional bank with five thousand customers to a national issuer with fifty million. Every professional who could have solved that problem already works for an institution that benefits from it staying unsolved. I don't.
Every ranking on this site is computed arithmetically from federal public records — CFPB complaint counts, FDIC deposit data, HMDA lending records, and published enforcement actions. The ranking formula is one line of arithmetic. There is no human judgement in the ranking, no editorial preference, and no institutional relationship that influences the output. The methodology is open; if you find an error, I want to know: ash@complaintrate.com. Full details of the formula, data sources, entity resolution process, and known limitations are on the methodology page.
ComplaintRate is operated by Asymmetry Data Ltd, a UK private limited company registered in England & Wales, company number 17189579. Registered office: 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ.
ComplaintRate is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any US federal agency.
Why this exists
The CFPB Consumer Complaint Database is one of the most comprehensive records of consumer financial harm ever assembled — and it has been almost entirely unusable by the people it was designed to help.
The full database contains nearly 14 million rows, but approximately 11 million of those are credit reporting disputes. Once you filter to banking, credit card, mortgage, and lending complaints — the records that actually reflect how financial institutions treat their customers — you get nearly 3 million complaint records spanning 2011 to present.
Even within that filtered set, the CFPB's own interface shows raw complaint counts without any normalisation. A bank with 10 million customers and 5,000 complaints looks worse than a bank with 100,000 customers and 4,000 complaints — even though the second bank is demonstrably worse by any fair measure.
ComplaintRate exists to fix that. We normalise every institution's complaint count by its estimated customer base, producing a rate that is directly comparable across institutions of any size. The result is a single, honest number: complaints per 1,000 customers.
What the data shows
Once you normalise the data, the findings are striking. Synchrony Financial — which issues credit cards for Amazon, PayPal, Google, and Lowe's — receives 22 times more complaints per customer than Goldman Sachs. Capital One receives 5 times more complaints per customer than JPMorgan Chase. Wells Fargo, despite years of headline-grabbing reputation efforts, still receives nearly twice as many complaints per customer as Chase.
None of this was visible in the raw data. It only becomes clear once you normalise.
A note on the CFPB
The CFPB database is a public record created under federal law. As of early 2026, the bureau faces significant political pressure that creates uncertainty about the long-term availability of this data. Our March 2026 snapshot represents the most complete, normalised, entity-resolved version of this record that has ever been assembled.
Regardless of what happens to the CFPB, this dataset — 14 years of complaint history, normalised and deduplicated — will remain available on ComplaintRate.
How the scores work
Complaint rates are calculated by dividing each institution's total CFPB complaints by its estimated customer count (derived from FDIC deposit data), then multiplying by 1,000. Full details of the formula, data sources, entity resolution process, and known limitations are on the methodology page.
Editorial independence
ComplaintRate.com publishes independently of the institutions it rates. Ratings, rankings, and institution scores are derived exclusively from federal public data. No financial institution pays to influence its score, its position in any ranking, or the content of its institution page.
Affiliate links appear only on pages for institutions that independently meet complaint-rate thresholds derived from the same federal dataset used to score every institution on the site — affiliate status has no effect on which institutions appear in rankings or on their scores. Editorial decisions about what to write, what data to surface, and how to frame findings are made without consultation with any financial institution, advertiser, or commercial partner.
Funding
ComplaintRate.com is currently self-funded and pre-revenue. The site does not accept advertising and has no external investors. Future revenue will come from consumer affiliate relationships (disclosed on /affiliate-disclosure) and B2B data products. Core complaint data will remain free to consumers.
Corrections
If you believe any data on this site is incorrect, email ash@complaintrate.com with the institution name and the specific claim you're disputing. Corrections are made within 7 business days where the underlying federal data supports the change; where it doesn't, you'll receive a reply explaining why.
Contact
Press inquiries, data licensing, research collaboration, and corrections all go to a single address: ash@complaintrate.com. For enterprise data products and B2B access, see the enterprise page.