The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is following the example of big companies that mine pools of information for insight into consumer behavior. The agency maligned by big banks for being overaggressive is assembling a Big Data operation to monitor how millions of Americans interact with lenders and rack up debt.
The two-year-old CFPB—which recently announced it’s recouped $425 million for consumers wronged by financial-services companies—is building massive data sets with records from companies it oversees. It’s demanding information on credit cards, credit monitoring, and debt cancellation products from major banks, and spending more than $10 million to buy data on auto and payday loans as well as mortgages from Experian, CoreLogic, and other companies. “Within the next year,” says Sendhil Mullainathan, the consumer bureau’s assistant director for research, “CFPB will be the best place for consumer finance data.”
