Analyzes CFPB consumer complaint data and uncovers political and social patterns across the U.S.
New York, N.Y. – Financial services are subject to government regulation, and are affected by policy dictated by elected politicians. As a result, financial institutions have political preferences. RewardExpert – a free service that helps users take full advantage of credit cards and travel rewards programs – today released the second installment of a two-part series titled America’s Financial Vampires: Are the Banks Playing Politics? Using consumer complaint data from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), the report investigates whether the political preferences of American financial institutions ultimately affect consumers.
In November 2017, RewardExpert released the first part of the series titled America’s Financial Vampires: Which Financial Institutions Are Sucking You Dry? The report ranked the best and the worst financial institutions based on consumer complaints for four categories: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and loans. In conducting the analysis for this report, RewardExpert discovered that complaint data closely match social and political patterns in the country.
“While working with the data, we wanted to see where people encounter more problems with financial institutions on average. We observed that high complaint rates were concentrated in diverse, urban regions that typically vote for democratic candidates,” says RewardExpert CEO and co-founder Roman Shteyn. “When we visualized the data on a map of the United States, we noticed that it looked strikingly similar to maps of county-by-county results of the last few presidential elections.”
Key findings of the report include:
- Republican-voting regions typically were regions in which few complaints per capita were received, and democratic-voting regions were ones with high per capita rates of consumer complaints. This pattern held true for both the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.
- Per capita rates of consumer complaints accurately predicted the outcome of both the 2016 and 2012 elections in approximately 75% of the 3,142 U.S. counties. This is an indicator which, to our knowledge, has not entered into the calculations and prognostications of mainstream election forecasting.
- The incidence of consumer financial complaints proved to be predictive not only of the county-level results of the US presidential elections, but also at the level of elections for the House of Representatives, and at a comparable rate of accuracy.
“After uncovering these patterns, we were able to draw three possible conclusions,” says Shteyn, “Either financial institutions preferentially prey upon people likely to vote for democratic candidates, and indirectly support the election of republicans by treating their constituents better, or liberals whine more than conservatives, who don’t complain nearly as much. Alternatively, it could be a combination of both.”
For further information and to view the full report, visit the RewardExpert website.
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