Limity ustawowe a zróżnicowanie kosztów kredytu
Statutory Limits and Differentiation of Loan Costs

Summary/Abstract: Competence in making credit decisions is becoming increasingly important in view of the growing social debt. The protection of consumer interests is pursued under various specific purposes. These include protection against incurring excessive fees and risk of losing loan repayment capacity. Regulator interventions in the form of interest and non-interest loan costs limits are used to achieve the first of these objectives. Literature studies and conclusions from the analysis of cash loan offers of the largest banks in Poland indicate the diverse importance of regulations in the area of reducing loan costs. The interest rates on cash loans used by a significant number of banks covered by the survey turned out to be close to the maximum statutory level, which may mean that regulations are a real barrier protecting consumers from incurring excessive costs. On the other hand, in relation to non-interest loan costs, the amount of fees turned out to be far from the statutory limits, which entails there is no real significance of restrictions in this segment of the loan and loan market. In addition, the degree of differentiation in total loan costs in the analysed cash loan offers proved to be high. This means that the current state of the market does not protect consumers against the risk of “overpaying” for credit and does not release them from the need to analyse offers.

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