Brazil's Central Bank complaints ranking explained

Where the complaints come from

People register complaints with the BC through its service channels. The BC sends each complaint to the institution for a reply. It then reviews a sample of the answered complaints to check for signs of a breach of rules it supervises ¹.

The BC says it does not act as a mediator in solving problems between financial institutions and their clients and users ¹. The ranking does not cover consumer relationship issues, which belong to the national consumer defence system ¹. The technical note points consumers to consumidor.gov.br, run by Senacon, for direct contact with companies ¹.

Senacon is the national consumer secretariat within the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. It was created by Decree 7,738 of 28 May 2012 ⁵.

Three kinds of complaint

The open data files sort each closed complaint into one of three counts ³.

How the index is calculated

The technical note, version 1.0 dated 30 July 2024, says the index is an estimate of procedente complaints per million clients ¹. For banks, the BC takes the statistical estimate of procedentes, multiplies it by 1,000,000 and divides by the number of clients ¹. The estimate extends the share of procedentes found in the sample to all answered complaints ¹.

A conglomerate gets one index that adds up the estimates of its institutions ¹. Client numbers are taken on the last day of the second-to-last month of the period ¹. Only complaints closed during the period count ¹.

The note says the sample-based method applies from the ranking for the second quarter of 2024, and that indexes under it tend to be higher than under the previous method ¹. Figures before and after that change are not like for like ¹.

Which institutions appear

• Top 15 list: the fifteen banks, finance companies and payment institutions with the most clients, ordered by index ¹.
• Second list: other institutions with thirty or more procedente complaints in the quarter ¹.
• Consortium administrators: one half-yearly list, leaving out those with fewer than six procedente regulated complaints in the half year ¹.
• Credit cooperatives and some other BC-authorised entities, such as brokers and direct credit companies, are left out ¹.
• Only authorised institutions in operation and not under liquidation, intervention or special temporary administration are included ¹.

Reading the open data

The BC publishes the ranking as an open dataset called Ranking de Instituições por Índice de Reclamações, with CSV files by year and period ². The dataset page lists coverage from July 2014 ². A JSON list of available rankings showed the third quarter of 2026 as the latest bank ranking on 25 October 2026 ⁴.

The data documentation lists a column called Índice Real, along with client counts from two BC registers, CCS and SCR ³. The total client figure counts distinct taxpayer numbers, so it is not the sum of the two registers ³. Size categories changed in July 2016 from a two million to a four million client split, so earlier groupings differ ³.

The BC ranks institutions by its own published index. This site does not rank or score them, and the index does not show how any single case was resolved ¹.