This is a loan we know most people: You apply for a loan and you pay it over an agreed period at a specific interest rate to the lender – usually the bank – back. The additional costs resulting from the interest rate thus provide a kind of fee from which the bank derives its profit from the lending business. So far so good. But how does a lender generate profits when the interest rate on the loan moves in the negative? Exactly as it is currently the case with the so-called “minus 5% loans”? Where is the advantage for the bank? How can a bank afford such an obvious minus business? A question that has been answered so far, as it is a marketing action and subsidized from appropriate budgets. Really? No – who knows the scene, knows that the calculus behind it is different. What? It’s about customer data, because the actually really valuable currency on the internet is personal data.

Loans with negative interest rates act as data bats

The fact is that nobody has something to give away and certainly not money. And banks do not even! Conclusion? Either an installment loan is paid back in a classic way with money including an interest premium and thus profitably for the bank or else with a mixture of money AND data.

Something that is widely understood as a digital economy, but is rather a verbal whitewashing for data octopi. Wanted examples? Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram – all free for users and yet these services generate huge revenue with targeted advertising. The basis for this is the user data and their digital motion profiles.

And this is exactly how the current promotional loans of the major credit portals actually work with their discount battle. Anyone claiming such a loan must therefore be aware that he is revealing his financial as well as private personality in large part for the alleged credit bargain. For example, when making a loan application, state how high your monthly earnings are, whether you are married, how many children live in your household at what age, if you have your own home or if you have a warm rent, if a car or motorbike is coming, etc.

But it goes even further, because in addition to these, but very personal data, is often the view of the bank account of the applicant and that with request of account number and password for online banking. But who now protests inwardly and asks the question, if this is allowed at all? Yes, it is. The legislator allows to use digital interfaces to retrieve account movements as part of a credit check. For it serves the validation of the information previously made by the credit customer with regard to salary receipt etc ..

The conclusion

Retrieval of data and an associated validity check is basically nothing unusual, as it has been used daily for many years by banks and their consumer loans. The question is, however, whether one indicates all of these data directly to a bank or via the detour of so-called comparison portals, which then possibly pass them on to third parties. What can happen if, when applying for certain cases, you forget to read the “fine print” and blindly agree.