PlainCredit publishes a profile for every financial company and debt collector that appears in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's complaint database, plus a page for every U.S. state and territory — built entirely from official government data. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every complaint figure on PlainCredit originates in the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Consumer Complaint Database. We download the public complaint records from the CFPB, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into company, debt-collector, state and ranking pages using shared templates. No profile is hand-written, and no complaint count, response rate, or dispute percentage is typed in by an editor. Each number you see is read directly from the official source record at request time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each measure is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, how derived measures (such as a company's rank by volume or a state's complaints-per-100,000-residents rate) are computed, which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every entity, so the rule that governs one profile governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• CFPB Consumer Complaint Database: the public record of complaints consumers have submitted to the Bureau about credit reporting, debt collection, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. It is the source for every complaint count, timely-response rate, dispute percentage, and product/issue breakdown shown across the site.
• Federal Reserve G.19 (Consumer Credit) release, via FRED: the official source for the credit-card interest-rate (APR) trends shown on our rate pages, attributed and dated where it appears.
• FDIC institution data, where shown: bank-level financial figures used on bank-rate context pages, attributed to the FDIC.

We do not scrape third-party review sites, we do not republish self-reported or crowd-sourced complaints, and we do not generate any complaint data ourselves. Company and collector names are displayed in normal title case for readability; the CFPB publishes many of them in all-capitals, and our de-shouting is a cosmetic display step only — the underlying source record is never altered. Where a figure is derived from the official data, the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the numbers are read straight from the CFPB files, the most common limitation is the complaint dataset itself rather than a transcription error. Complaint counts reflect submitted grievances, not adjudicated wrongdoing, and are strongly influenced by company size and consumer awareness — a larger firm naturally accumulates more complaints. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published: it de-duplicates companies by canonical name, shows a value as unavailable when the source omits it, and reconciles per-company, per-state and national rollups so the same figure is consistent wherever it appears.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainCredit does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any bank, lender, credit bureau, or debt collector in exchange for how its data is presented. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which companies we cover, how a complaint figure is reported, or how any page ranks. The figures are a transparent presentation of the official government numbers — not a rating, endorsement, or warning about any specific company.

Update schedule

The CFPB updates its complaint database continuously, and the Federal Reserve publishes G.19 on a regular schedule. We refresh our database from these sources and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed. Each page names its source and the period it covers; see the methodology for data-vintage details.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Email hello@plaincredit.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official CFPB source record for that company, collector, or state.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known data limitation, we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the CFPB record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and point you to the official CFPB Consumer Complaint Database so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plaincredit.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly when making financial decisions, see our disclaimer.