II Estadísticas de las TAE y precios medios aplicados a los micropréstamos (2024)

Abstract

The doctrine on usury established by the Spanish Supreme Court, since the judgment of 11.25.2015, provides for resorting to the statistics of the Bank of Spain to determine what is the normal interest rate of money (for the purposes of article 1 of the Spanish Usury Law). In addition, since STS 4.3.2020, the Spanish Supreme Court has been insisting that the average interest rate that must be taken from the statistics used as a reference must be that of the specific market of the product. However, in terms of non-mortgage loans of non-banking lenders, there are no public statistics since non-banking lenders are not reporting entities according to Circular 1/2010, nor are they subject to prior registration. Consequently, we intend to reflect the average rates and prices applied to payday loans, with updated data for the entire 2023 financial year, as well as demonstrate that the APR is not an indicator able to represent the onerousness of a payday loan, due to the exponential effect caused by the frequency of payments incorporated by its formula.