Deeper in debt

Almost one million people in Poland have problems paying off their debts - 10 percent of all borrowers - according to the first national report on borrowers of high and increased risk. The report was prepared by economic information bureau InfoMonitor Biuro Informacji Gospodarczej, which manages a database of loan-takers' reliability.

The regions with the highest amount of liabilities overdue are the Mazowieckie and Silesian voivodships, with zł.769 million and zł.601 million due respectively. These two regions also have the highest number of debtors with overdue payments - 132,000 in Silesia and 100,000 in the Mazowieckie voivodship. The average amount of an overdue payment throughout Poland is zł.5,000, while the total amount of overdue debt in Poland reaches zł.5 billion. The average person with payment trouble is a male aged 31 to 40.

The Mazowieckie and Silesian voivodships are highly urbanized, making access to loan services of various sorts much easier, said Aleksandra Łukasiewicz, director of the banking-products division at Open Finance.

Łukasiewicz stressed that the inability to pay off debt does not follow from low income alone. "A number of unreliable debtors appear among people with high income as well," she said. "It is also young people, who start their first jobs and begin buying too much at once," she added, saying that to a large extent, problems with debts stem from consumer loans rather than mortgages.

More and more loan-offering institutions investigate their potential client's reliability by turning to debt registers such as that of InfoMonitor, or the Credit Information Bureau (BIK). Still, noted Łukasiewicz, many of these companies use the data to "punish" a client with a bad record rather than to reward customers who pay their debts on time.

"From that perspective the Polish loan market is still lagging behind [the West]," she said.