NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Nov 14, 2012) - BillGuard, the leading provider of transaction monitoring and resolution services, today announced that it is collaborating with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on the sharing of data to better protect US consumers from questionable sales and billing practices. This announcement was made today at the CFPB's 'Project Catalyst' event in Mountain View, CA, where CFPB Director Richard Cordray unveiled the bureau's plans to support consumer-friendly innovation and entrepreneurship in the financial marketplace.
"We are honored to work with the CFPB on our shared mission to protect American consumers," said BillGuard founder and CEO, Yaron Samid. "The CFPB has become a true friend and enabler to BillGuard and other consumer empowering technology companies. Behind the formal government suits you find big-data geeks at heart who are passionately committed to bettering the lives of American consumers. We are grateful to be a part of Project Catalyst and excited to announce this important collaboration."
Project Catalyst is an initiative designed by the CFPB to support consumer-friendly innovation and entrepreneurship in the marketplace. This project is aimed at fulfilling the Bureau's mandate under Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to give all consumers access to fair, transparent, competitive, and innovative markets. Through Project Catalyst, the CFPB will engage more closely with companies and entrepreneurs who are at the front lines of innovation.
Earlier this year the CFPB made consumer credit card complaint information available to the public via the Bureau's Consumer Complaint Database. BillGuard is leveraging this publicly-available data to supplement its own national billing dispute database which normalizes billing disputes across multiple sources, including its own application, the web, card issuing banks and the government. The billing dispute data is centrally analyzed by the BillGuard Analytics Engine to identify patterns of deceptive and unfair sales and billing practices that have been reported by consumers. BillGuard's free consumer service utilizes this crowdsourced big-data analytics to then alert credit and debit cardholders to similar charges on their cards, and facilitates direct-to-merchant resolution. BillGuard will be providing the CFPB data from its billing dispute and resolution database to allow the Bureau to observe trends in consumer complaints and resolution.
For more information, please visit www.billguard.com.
About BillGuard:
BillGuard Inc. is the leading provider of transaction monitoring and resolution services for consumers, merchants and the financial services community. Through its patent-pending crowdsourced transaction analytics engine, BillGuard addresses unique personal finance security challenges in the digital marketplace, ensuring trusted commerce everywhere, on every device. BillGuard analyzes millions of consumer billing disputes to alert debit and credit card holders to deceptive, erroneous and unauthorized charges and facilitates direct-to-merchant online resolution. In 2012 the company was inducted into the Online Banking Report Hall of Fame as one of the top online banking innovations of all time. BillGuard is headquartered in New York and is backed by the world's top investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Innovation Endeavors, and IA Ventures.