OJK Delivers Good News, Rules Forbidding Loans To Collect Customers Through Debt Collectors Are Being Prepared

JAKARTA - The Financial Services Authority (OJK) is still making efforts to improve the fintech peer-to-peer lending business activities to ensure that consumer protection aspects are still met.

Most recently, the Chairman of the OJK Board of Commissioners, Wimboh Santoso, said that his party plans to start enforcing rules prohibiting customer collection by using the services of debt collectors.

"The collection using the services of a debt collector will be reviewed, and even banned," he said through a virtual channel in the Legal or Illegal Online Loans forum, Friday, February 11.

According to Wimboh, one aspect that is being studied by the authorities is the element of supervision in the field. The reason is, most of the fintech lending aka online loans (pinjol) use third parties to collect customers who are in arrears.

Thus, the existence of debt collector services who are outsourcing personnel will further complicate the supervision of the OJK.

"This debt collector is outsourced, so it is difficult for us to track it down," he said.

For information, OJK itself has suspended the issuance of permits for new fintech lending since February 2020. The moratorium aims to evaluate the compliance and implementation of governance of all business actors registered with the authorities.

To note, until the close of the 2021 period, the number of lending by fintech lending was said to have reached IDR 295.8 trillion. Meanwhile, credit distribution in December 2021 was 13.61 trillion with an outstanding of Rp. 29.8 trillion.