Research & Policy Focus
DICRI investigates how digital platforms reshape credit access, repayment, and enforcement beyond traditional regulatory frameworks. The Initiative combines comparative legal analysis, empirical fieldwork, and platform governance studies to examine how informal digital credit systems operate across jurisdictions and how regulatory responses adapt to emerging financial infrastructures.
Policy Domains
Digital Informal Credit Markets
Digital credit increasingly operates outside traditional banking channels. DICRI examines non-bank lending, Buy Now, Pay Later schemes, embedded finance, and app-based credit models that redefine eligibility, pricing, and contractual form.
Particular attention is given to how digital infrastructures restructure access to credit, alter risk allocation, and shape financial inclusion dynamics. The focus is not only on product design, but on the systemic conditions that enable rapid scaling of high-velocity lending models across jurisdictions.
AI-Enabled Debt Collection
Credit enforcement is increasingly embedded in predictive systems rather than formal legal procedures. DICRI analyses automated deductions, behavioural optimisation, reputational mechanisms, scripted communication models, and virtual agents as emerging forms of enforcement-by-design.
The Initiative examines how AI-supported segmentation, timing calibration, and escalation logic reshape borrower protection, contestability, and regulatory oversight. Rather than treating enforcement as a sequence of isolated acts, DICRI studies it as an adaptive behavioural infrastructure.
Platform Governance and Enforcement
Digital platforms increasingly determine credit access and repayment conditions internally, often before courts or supervisory authorities become involved. DICRI studies how enforcement capacity migrates from external legal processes to technical systems, interface architecture, and data-driven decision environments.
The focus lies on structural shifts in governance: how decision-making authority becomes embedded in algorithms, workflows, and platform rules, and how this reconfiguration challenges established models of legal accountability.
Comparative Regulatory Responses
Digital credit practices travel across jurisdictions while adapting to local legal traditions and supervisory structures. DICRI conducts cross-jurisdictional analysis across Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa to assess how regulatory frameworks respond to platform-based credit ecosystems.
The Initiative examines divergence and convergence in supervisory strategies, enforcement reform, vulnerability protection, and model governance. Comparative insight is central to informing policy debate beyond single-market analysis.
Methodological Approach
DICRI integrates doctrinal mapping, semi-structured interviews, surveys, and platform walkthrough analysis. By combining legal analysis with empirical research and digital infrastructure studies, the Initiative develops a comparative and policy-relevant understanding of how credit governance operates in practice.
The objective is not merely descriptive scholarship, but structural analysis capable of informing regulatory and supervisory debate in rapidly evolving digital finance environments.