There are, however, serious problems due to an insufficient financial education of consumers
who have problems to recognize effective interest rates and to correctly anticipate intertemporal
payments. Accordingly, there is the suggestion that loan suppliers should indicate the effective
interest rate including all charges (and not simply flat rates). A related problem refers to hidden
charges in case of repayment problems which should be made transparent and which should be
limited to fair amounts. With regard to the total debt burden that is often difficult to assess
appropriately for uneducated customers, a regulation has limited personal loans to a maximum of
5 times monthly income (since end of 2005). However, any such regulation can be only a very
rough guide as the repayment ability of customers depends only partially on income but also on
wealth, prospects and existing obligations. It would be thus better to support suppliers in this
sector to advance modern technologies in calculating reasonable financial burden. Whatever
measure is taken, it would be always advantageous that information about borrowers is
centralized so that different loan suppliers can get information about total obligations of their
customers. This requires expanding existing credit bureaus to the field of personal loans and other
fields of NBFIs as well.