Improving Consumer Protection for Low-Income Customers in P2P Lending
Authors
Ajisatria Suleiman
Despite its significant growth, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is a controversial sub-sector in financial technology (fintech), especially the practices of lenders that offer unsecured cash, or payday, loans. Consumer groups believe that existing personal data protection systems are inadequate to govern fintechs and that this has led to data abuse by the majority of fintech payday lenders.
Aggressive personal data collection and use by fintech payday lending firms is primarily the result of an insufficient system for assessing the creditworthiness of Indonesians. In an effort to close the gap between the existing regulatory rules and the actual market conduct, the fintech industry association, AFPI, has stepped into a “co-regulatory” role with OJK. While the partnership of OJK and AFPI are already on the right track, both needs to improve their ability to collaborate when making, adopting, enforcing, and evolving their policies and regulations through series of regulatory and market reforms.
