The recent crisis involving Bilt, a fintech that specializes in rent-payment rewards, is almost a perfect storm of the challenges faced by fintechs, banks, regulators, and their customers when it comes to third-party partnerships and their discontents.
This week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) reported that it had met with Bilt to discuss the issues surrounding the flawed transition process when its partnership with Wells Fargo ended in February of this year. The two companies had been working together since 2022 to offer the Bilt Mastercard. When the partnership ended, Bilt struggled to efficiently move customers into its new Bilt 2.0 structure. Customer complaints were rampant: rent and mortgage payments were returned, delayed, or debited without reaching intended recipients. Card declines were reported amid general confusion about the new arrangement. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who took an early interest in the problem, said that there had been a 1,300% spike in CFPB complaints due to the problems of the Bilt transition.
The CFPB’s statement today expresses confidence in the steps Bilt is taking to remedy the situation, including “reimbursing fees for more than 500 newly identified customers from its outreach following discussions with the CFPB.” The agency also noted that it would “continue monitoring Bilt’s efforts until it is satisfied that full redress will be provided and will share another update at such time.”
What are some of the biggest takeaways from Bilt’s breakup with Wells Fargo and its complaint-ridden transition process?
Partnerships are hard, breaking up can be harder
For all the understandable concern about making fintech/bank partnerships work, there is relatively little discussion about what fintechs should do—or need to do—when a partnership is ending to ensure that the transition does not negatively impact customers or damage relationships with other partners.
Arguably, this is the biggest single takeaway from the Bilt breakup and transition: whether it is because of a regulatory decision, a business challenge, or a bank failure, when transitions out of these partnerships go poorly, the negative impacts tend to fall disproportionately on consumers. There is also some question about who bears the responsibility of protecting customer data and funds during transitions. As such, when these events occur, they can have an industry-wide impact on consumer trust toward fintechs and can blunt innovation by making new technologies and services seem risky to end users and potential partners.
The human touch helps in a crisis
Even though there were reportedly issues with customers accessing live customer support due to “high volumes,” the fact that many Bilt customers were steered toward AI chatbots to resolve issues was a operational and, potentially reputational, mistake.
On the operational level, many customers reported that AI chatbots were unable to answer their questions or provide basic information, let alone resolve specific complaints. Reputationally, this can leave an impression that a firm does not care about effectively triaging customer problems, even if it is understandably not able to solve some problems immediately.
This is also a reminder that human agents that can respond with authentic empathy to confused and frustrated customers are still valuable at a time of increasingly agentic customer care.
Regulatory clarity requires regulatory authority
The lack of regulatory clarity about the ultimate responsibility for safeguarding consumer data and capital during transitions like the one involving Bilt and Wells Fargo is a real problem.
But this lack of clarity is compounded when the disposition of the regulatory body itself is difficult to discern. In its statement, the CFPB underscored its preference for a “collaborative process” rather than what is called a “protracted investigation, followed by a public enforcement action, which could be litigated for years before consumers get any redress.” This, plus a swipe at the Biden-era CFPB director Rohit Chopra, suggests that the CFPB prefers to pursue a less confrontational approach when it comes to holding companies accountable when their actions harm consumers.
This is perhaps better than no approach at all. Recall that the Trump Administration in February 2025 launched a near-shutdown of the CFPB, stopping all enforcement actions, halting new and ongoing investigations, and even locking staff out of buildings. Many of the administration’s actions have been put on hold by a federal court judge ruling in 2025, and oral arguments on a lawsuit challenging the administration’s actions against the CFPB were heard this February. In the meantime, a slimmed-down CFPB has changed its mission to focus on what it calls issues of “clear consumer harm, particularly fraud affecting servicemembers and veterans.”
How well this approach will serve the consumers harmed by the next failed fintech/bank partnership remains to be seen.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
