Examining persistent inequities in financial complaint resolution for older Americans and veterans in the United...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) maintains a centralized complaint intake and routing system, yet whether company response timeliness differs across demographic groups and neighborhoods remains under-investigated. We analyze over 1.27 million consumer financial complaints submitted between 2014 and 2022 to assess whether older adults and service members face disparities in company response timeliness. Logistic regression models of company response timeliness in the CFPB portal show that while the predicted probability of a timely response improved from 97.7% in 2014 to 99.4% in 2022 for the general public, disparities remained. Service members consistently had lower probabilities of timely response, with gaps of 0.3 to 1.8 percentage points. Older adults shifted from a slight advantage in 2014 (+0.5 points) to a disadvantage in 2022 (-0.6 points). Consumers in disadvantaged neighborhoods also had lower predicted probabilities of timely company response, with the largest descriptive disparities observed among older adults.