Non-performing loans (NPLs) are private loans not being serviced according to the contractual agreement between borrowers and financial institutions. Following the 2008 financial crisis, NPLs became a significant concern for EU prudential regulation. Conversely, consumer protection law is primarily invoked to the extent that it is instrumental in achieving the objectives of prudential regulation. This EU approach fails to address the tension between prudential policy and consumer protection. Against this background, this thesis unpacks the tension, exploring how prudential policy interacts with consumer protection laws and how the tension between these two EU policies affects consumer protection in five European jurisdictions, characterised by high levels of household indebtedness: Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain.
It does so with a multi-method approach to capture the interdisciplinary nature of NPLs, which significantly overlaps legal, economic and political research. Notably, it utilises process tracing tools, qualitative content analysis, descriptive statistics, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.