The Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) has taken notice of the various emerging concerns regarding mobile applications on Google Playstore offering nano/micro personal loans to vulnerable customers, mostly belonging to the lower to middle income class customers.
After the appearance of a news report in a leading newspaper, a preliminary probe was conducted, and it was noted that a number of mobile applications on Google Playstore were offering nano-loans without fulfilling the legal requirements of Non-Banking Micro Finance Companies’ (NBMFC’s) law, said a press release issued here.
The NBMFC law offers a framework to regulate nano-loans only above PKR 10,000/-, whereas most of these applications are only offering loans smaller than this. As per the initial findings, these applications have well over 10 million downloads by the general public.
The preliminary findings inter alia revealed that these mobile applications had contradictions between interest rate and processing fees charged from the borrowers versus the rates advertised.—APP
