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

Abstract 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 2014–2022 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.