Anyone who has signed a loan agreement with a bank is familiar with this issue. Ancillary fees in loan agreements. Ancillary fees, often referred to as processing fees, manipulation fees or collection fees, are often not questioned. Above all, their specific consideration remains open. Until now, this was considered permissible. Currently, this has been deemed non-transparent by the Supreme Court.
Most recently, the Austrian Supreme Court declared amounts referred to as "service fees" for fitness studios and cell phone operators to be non-transparent and inadmissible because there was no specific consideration.
In its recent decision, the Supreme Court found the processing fee often charged by banks to be non-transparent and therefore inadmissible (2 Ob 238/23y).
In the case in question, the processing fee prescribed by the bank was inadmissible because the wording of the contract and the different fees made it unclear to the consumer which specific additional service or expense category was to be covered by the processing fee.
The processing fee also serves as (flat-rate) compensation for the activity and effort involved in processing and providing the loan and would therefore in principle also cover the services charged with the additional fees. The extent to which there is therefore overlap or double charging between the loan processing fee and the other fees is no longer sufficiently clear for consumers to check.
The Supreme Court thus departed from its previous case law on processing fees - according to its decision in 2016, processing fees were still permissible.
Depending on the wording in the loan agreement, the processing fee for consumer loans may be inadmissible and therefore recoverable plus interest . This applies both to loans that have already been repaid and to current credit relationships.
Would you like to have your existing loan agreement checked for possible reclaims of ancillary fees? We would be happy to review your contract and work to get your money back.
