Before opening a bank account, you may want to know whether other customers have raised problems and whether a regulator has taken action against the bank. Two public records can help: consumer complaints and enforcement actions. They answer different questions, so start with the bank’s name and the regulator that supervises it.
A complaint is a consumer’s account of a problem. An enforcement action is a formal step taken by a regulator. One does not automatically lead to the other, and neither record predicts what your experience will be.
Check the institution’s full legal name before searching. A familiar name may be used across related companies, while an older enforcement order may list a name the bank used when the order became final. Write down any names you find so you can tell which institution a result concerns.
Then identify the supervisor. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, oversees national banks and federal savings associations. The FDIC oversees certain state-chartered banks and thrifts that are not Federal Reserve members. State member banks are supervised by the Federal Reserve; checking that agency’s records is outside the scope of this guide.
Search the CFPB’s complaint database
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Complaint Database lets you view and filter published complaints. Look for the institution’s name, then read the product, issue, date and company-response fields. An account-opening concern and a dispute about a credit card may appear under the same company but tell you different things about the account you are considering.
The database has a size limit worth knowing. The CFPB publishes complaints about banks with more than $10 billion in assets. It refers complaints about smaller depository institutions to other regulators rather than publishing them there. If your search finds nothing, first consider whether the bank falls outside the database’s coverage.
There is also a delay. The CFPB sends a complaint to the named company, which responds through a secure portal. The complaint becomes public after the company responds, confirms a commercial relationship with the consumer, or 15 days pass, whichever comes first. A complaint filed yesterday may not yet be visible.
Put complaint counts beside bank size
A count needs a denominator. A bank with millions of customers may receive more complaints than a small bank simply because it handles more accounts. Compare volume with the institution’s size and customer base where you can. If you filter by state or ZIP code, population matters too.
Read the response field alongside the count. It can show whether the company responded to a published complaint, although a response alone does not tell you that the consumer’s problem was resolved. Look at the issues described as well. Several entries about the same fee may give you a reason to read that fee’s account terms closely, but the entries do not establish how often all customers encounter it.
People choose whether to submit complaints, so the database is not a statistical sample of bank customers. A listing shows that someone raised an issue; it does not prove wrongdoing. A handful of listings, or none at all, cannot settle the question of how a bank generally treats customers.
Look for enforcement actions separately
For a national bank or federal savings association, use the OCC’s Enforcement Actions Search. You can search by institution name and narrow results by location, action type, date or subject matter. The OCC says it may take enforcement action for violations of law or regulatory requirements, unsafe or unsound practices, and other specified grounds. Read the order itself to see what conduct it addresses rather than relying on a search-result label.
Check the order’s date and status. The OCC warns that a listed institution name reflects its identity when the document became final and that an order shown in the search may not reflect its current status. Look for later modifications or a termination before treating an old order as a current restriction.
An empty OCC search is not proof of a clean history. It covers listed records, and the OCC notes that certain prohibition notifications issued before December 23, 2022, do not appear on its lists. For an FDIC-supervised institution, start with the FDIC’s information on consumer-compliance enforcement actions. The supervisor matters because an OCC search alone does not cover every bank.
Make a short record before you decide
Keep the checks side by side: the institution’s legal name and supervisor, any CFPB complaints relevant to the account, the company-response fields, and any enforcement orders you found. For an order, note both its original date and any later change in status. For complaints, note the period and the bank’s size rather than writing down a total without context.
If the bank is too small for its complaints to appear in the CFPB database, that is a limit of the search, not a favorable finding. State banking regulators and state attorneys general may hold other records, but their searches are not covered here. You can contact the relevant regulator or a consumer protection office with a specific question. These public records can help you ask better questions before opening an account; they cannot tell you how the bank will handle yours.
Please seek a professional. This article is general information, not financial, tax or insurance advice. Please seek a licensed financial, tax or insurance professional about your own situation.
