Bank incident charges soon to be better supervised. Long awaited, the decree aimed at strengthening the ceiling on bank charges for fragile customers is currently being examined by the Council of State. It should be published shortly, probably early next week. Faced with the coronavirus crisis, the government has warned it will strengthen the supervision of the costs of banking incidents which affects around 1.5 million French people each year out of an estimated total population of 3.2 million. On June 4, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire made a commitment before the National Assembly to allow this clientele in difficulty to access “faster” and “longer” to the capping of bank charges.
The text, which Le Parisien was able to consult, indeed makes two major modifications to the initial text of 2018. A customer will now be considered fragile if he accumulates “five irregularities or payment incidents in the same month” and not no longer only following “account irregularities or payment incidents repeated for three consecutive months”. Another clarification brought by this decree: the consumer placed under this regime will have access to the ceiling of his bank charges for three months instead of a duration of one to two months, variable according to the banking establishments. Thanks to these new criteria, the Minister of the Economy hopes to widen the number of beneficiaries by capping costs by “at least 15%”.
Four-month deadline for banks
Faced with the aggravation of precariousness with the economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19, many consumer associations and the CGT Banques et Assurances union had called on the government to generalize this system of capping the costs of banking incidents. Today they say they are disappointed. “This is a step forward but still far from sufficient,” analyzes Jean-Luc Mano, president of the CLCV (Consumption Housing Living environment). When we take a public cap measure, as the minister wishes, it is unthinkable to rely on the discretionary appreciation of the banks, but this is what it does since the appreciation of financial fragility of a customer is defined in a variable way from one bank to another according to the usual financial flows of its customers ”, he regrets.
If the banks had until June 30 to make public their definition of what a “fragile” customer is, each has its own vision. “At BNP Paribas, the ceiling below which a client can be detected as fragile in the event of incidents is set at 1,900 euros while this ceiling is 1,497 euros at the CIC, protests Matthieu Robin, project manager for the financial sector with UFC Que Choisir. As soon as we don’t harmonize the definition of what a fragile client is, the decree loses its ambition, ”he insists. Second criticism of the decree: it gives banks a period of four months to apply it, ie from November. “This delay is much too long and does not correspond to the urgency of the economic situation”, tackles the president of the CLCV.
But by then, in early July, the Banque de France may well create a surprise by practicing “name and shame” ( Editor’s note: naming and stigmatizing in English ) banks that have not complied with the ceiling for incident charges.
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