A published report has spotlighted how a pair of fast-growing financial services institutions, including one with ties to one of the debt-buying industry’s largest players, are not being regulated by the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, even though the companies have been the subject of thousands of consumer complaints. The analysis was conducted by NerdWallet, a consumer finance website.
The two companies — Green Dot Corp., and Credit One Bank — each have less than $10 billion in assets, which puts them under the threshold to be regulated by the BCFP. The issue, according to the report, is that because neither company is officially supervised by the BCFP, that consumer complaints filed against the companies are not showing up on the agency’s public-facing consumer complaint database.
An analysis of complaints found that nearly one-third of all complaints filed with the BCFP by consumers are not included in the public-facing database, largely because the complaints fall outside of the BCFP’s jurisdiction, according to the report. In most cases, the complaints are forwarded to the appropriate federal agency by the BCFP.
Green Dot issues prepaid debit cards on behalf of retailers like Walmart and handles transactions for Apple Pay Cash. It has received nearly 1,600 complaints, which would place it among the 2% of companies that have been complained about the most within the BCFP’s database, but only five complaints are public, because the company has less than $10 billions assets.
Credit One Bank is a credit card issuer that is owned by Sherman Financial Group, one of the nation’s largest debt buyers. The owner and CEO of Sherman Financial is Ben Navarro, who tried to purchase
