Our Executive Board, the Chairwoman of the Legal, Risk & Compliance Committee and our Managing Director met for the first time for a strategy meeting. According to the Executive Board, the adoption of a comprehensive data protection concept at the end of last year marked the successful completion of the association’s set-up phase. The aim of the meeting was to critically review the last 6 years since the association was founded and to define goals for the future.
Some of the key results are:
- There will be a regular quality survey among members to find out their level of satisfaction with the work of the association and their expectations of the DLA. The results will form the working basis for the strategy meetings.
- The committee work shall be strengthened in order to offer more opportunities for participation. To this end, greater use shall be made of the possibility of setting up working groups on special topics.
- The chairpersons of the committees shall more closely be involved in the DLA’s public relations work and shall represent relevant topics prominently.
- In addition to the elected members of the committees and working groups, colleagues of the various members will also be allowed to attend the meetings in the future. By opening up the meetings, we want to raise awareness of the high quality of the committee work and generate more interest.
- Our industry standards will be further developed into guidelines. It is a fact that an increasing number of Fintech Lenders are choosing to be regulated in the White Capital Market. This inevitably leads to a double burden in terms of compliance with the strict legal requirements and those of the DLA standards. Since it has never been the aim of the standards to set higher requirements than the legislator, but rather to provide guidance for all Fintech Lenders operating in the Grey Capital Market, the standards should in future apply even more clearly as a minimum framework for precisely these actors.
- We do not lower our high standards for the quality, professionalism and integrity of future members. DLA has built a strong reputation over many years. Business models such as unregulated buy-now-pay-later and payday loans, which pose major risks to consumers, will not be accepted as members in the future either. The same applies to qualified subordinated loans, which are being sold in Germany and Austria in particular with dire consequences for private investors.
- We will continue to enter into partnerships with third parties where it makes sense for us to do so, because they create real added value for the members of DLA and the ecosystem. Important factors are also reciprocity as well as a professional and honest interaction between the people involved.
- We act in the knowledge that DLA is the one and only organization in Europe that represents the Fintech Lending or Digital Lending issue in its entirety. We do not want to be a trade association for a single regulation or a specific form of business model, e.g. B2C or C2C. We believe that this is the wrong thematic and equally the wrong economic approach because it does not carry enough weight on the scales in the long term. We recognize that our partner associations in Canada, India and other countries around the world that have taken exactly this path have done the right thing, because today they are strong and indispensable associations in their regions.
The strategy meeting will take place annually from now on.