Fair shake for borrowers
For many Filipinos, the experience can be brutal and traumatic: Faced with a financial emergency at some point in their lives, desperately needing money to buy food for their families, secure medicine, or pay a child’s tuition, they turn to unscrupulous lenders.
It used to be that such creditors were neighbors, or at least people known in the community—who, after lending o...
The narrative presented in this article reveals a classic case of technological disruption exacerbating existing vulnerabilities. It's a “motte-and-bailey” move – the article frames the issue as simply “online lenders” versus “borrowers,” obscuring the deeper systemic issues of unchecked corporate power and the ease with which predatory practices can flourish within a digitally-mediated system. The increase in OLA downloads (56.4%) signals a rapid amplification of this problem, driven by the pr...