Stakeholder Summary

Project: AWS Consumer Complaint Intelligence Dashboard Focus: North Carolina Credit Card Fees & Interest Complaints Data Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database Period: January 2024 – April 2026 Prepared by: Data Analytics Portfolio Project

What This Analysis Covers

This report summarizes 542 consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by North Carolina residents about credit card fees and interest charges. The complaints span from January 2024 through April 2026 and involve 23 financial institutions.

Top 3 Findings

Finding 1: A Small Number of Companies Account for Most Complaints

Four companies — Synchrony Financial, Citibank, Capital One, and Bread Financial — together account for 328 of the 542 complaints, or about 60% of the total. Synchrony Financial alone accounts for 123 complaints, more than any other company by a significant margin.

What this means: If regulators, consumer advocates, or internal compliance teams want to reduce complaint volume, focusing on the top four issuers would address the majority of the problem.

Finding 2: Fee Disputes Are the Dominant Issue — But Nearly One in Three Consumers Receives Financial Compensation

65.5% of complaints are about specific fee problems (late fees, service fees, etc.), rather than general interest rate levels. This suggests consumers are most often disputing specific charges they believe are incorrect or unfair.

At the same time, 169 complaints (31.2%) resulted in monetary relief from the company — meaning the company acknowledged the issue and provided financial compensation. This is a meaningful rate and suggests that many fee disputes have merit.

What this means: Fee transparency and dispute resolution processes are the highest-priority areas for improvement. When consumers escalate to the CFPB, they have a roughly 1-in-3 chance of receiving financial compensation.

Finding 3: Companies Meet Response Deadlines, But That Doesn’t Mean Consumers Are Satisfied

99.6% of complaints received a timely response from the company within the CFPB’s required timeframe. However, 63.3% of complaints were closed with an explanation only — no financial remedy was provided.

What this means: Companies are operationally compliant with CFPB deadlines, but a timely response does not guarantee a satisfactory outcome for the consumer. The gap between “responded on time” and “resolved to the consumer’s satisfaction” is an important distinction for customer experience teams.

2 Recommendations

Recommendation 1: Prioritize Fee Dispute Resolution Transparency

Given that 65.5% of complaints involve fee problems and 31.2% result in monetary relief, financial institutions should review their fee dispute processes to ensure consumers understand how to escalate effectively. Clear, accessible dispute channels may reduce the number of complaints that reach the CFPB.

Recommendation 2: Investigate the March 2026 Complaint Spike

March 2026 recorded 38 complaints — the highest single month in the dataset and nearly double the monthly average of 19.4. This spike warrants further investigation to determine whether it reflects a specific policy change, billing cycle issue, or external event that triggered increased consumer friction.

Limitations to Keep in Mind

  • This data covers only North Carolina and only fee/interest complaints — findings may not apply nationally or to other complaint types.
  • Complaint counts reflect consumer perception, not verified regulatory violations.
  • The AWS pipeline described in this project is a designed architecture and has not been deployed to production.

This analysis was conducted as an undergraduate data analytics portfolio project. All findings are derived from the CFPB public complaint database and have been validated against the source data.