20/03/2026
Finantsinspektsioon and the Supreme Court held a meeting this week to discuss legal issues, focusing particularly on the challenges of consumer loans and possible solutions to them.
The courts handled over 20,000 expedited payment order cases related to consumer credit agreements in 2024 and the value of the loans that people are struggling to repay reaches tens of millions of euros each year.
A lot of consumer credit claims were earlier processed in the courts as expedited payment order cases, but this option was restricted last year as the judges handling the claims found that some of the lenders had not followed the principles of responsible lending and were tending to abuse the option of expedited court proceedings. Impermissible additional costs were added to loans, and loans were given to people who were clearly unable to repay them. There were also problems with the quality of the claims submitted to debt collection agencies.
Consumer credit claims are now handled in the courts through normal legal proceedings that demand more time and resources, and the courts are overloaded. The Supreme Court stressed at the meeting that lenders and debt collection agencies have to improve their practices. This needs supervision over them to be more effective to reduce the number of claims reaching the court and speed up the resolution of those claims.
Finantsinspektsioon explained its supervisory measures and pointed out that a balance needs to be found with consumer loans between assessing the ability of people to pay from a thorough assessment of the information that has been collected, and keeping the service available and convenient.
Lenders have expressed concern that regulation is becoming an increasing burden and is hard for them to interpret. Complex requirements make lenders less competitive and a lot of illegal lenders who do not follow the rules at all have appeared in the market. Finantsinspektsioon has submitted numerous crime reports to the police about the activities of these lenders.
A positive credit register should improve matters
The Supreme Court and Finantsinspektsioon agreed that the problems with consumer credit would be eased by the positive credit register that is proposed in a draft act that is currently under discussion in the Riigikogu. The register would bring together in one place all of the information needed for lending decisions and would help lenders assess better the capacity of borrowers to repay the money borrowed and would discourage excessive lending. It would not however solve the problem of loans being issued too easily without any reference to the existing information on earlier debts.
Finantsinspektsioon also informed the court about the new consumer credit directive from the European Union that will help make the rights and obligations of lenders and borrowers clearer and will improve how information is communicated to consumers.