The technological dimension of mortgage lending. A European private law perspective

This thesis analyses the technological evolution of lending practices within the European mortgage market. Since they aim at once at increasing consumers’ welfare and at fostering competition and financial soundness in the banking sector, mortgage contracts represent a crucial domain of European private law. However, in the regulatory pattern conceived after the 2007-2008 economic crisis, the EU legislator has paid scarce attention to the finance and technology innovations that are reshaping the lending relationship. In such a scenario, this research aims at providing a systematic private law focus on the technological challenges emerging in consumer protection and credit data governance. To this purpose, the first two chapters constitute the legal and empirical frame for the discussion. Chapter I discusses the restrictive regulation contained in the Mortgage Credit Directive (2014/17EU), investigating how the «welfare function» of mortgages has been reconciled with the rationale of over-indebtedness prevention and financial stability. Chapter II maps the spread of algorithmic credit scoring and related technological practices within the European market of retail credit. The last two sections contain the substantive discussion of the emerging questions. In the contractual perspective, the main concern is the effectiveness of consumer rights and prerogatives in increasingly automated mortgage proceedings (chapter III). From the perspective of credit information regulation, instead, the thesis analyses the intensive consumer data processing performed by data brokers, raising several criticisms and advancing the proposal of an integrated Euro-area credit database (chapter IV)