Google said on April 27 that it has taken necessary enforcement action against more than 3,500 personal loan apps in 2022, which includes removing them from Play Store, for violating its Play Policy requirements, as the tech giant steps up its crackdown on unregistered and fraudulent lenders.
The company did not disclose any specific information on how many apps it removed in this process during the entire year. In August 2022, Google stated that it had blocked 2,000 personal loan providers from its app marketplace in India from January 2022 to July 2022.lendersApart from app removal, Google's enforcement actions on Play Store include app rejection, suspension, restricting the discoverability of the app, making it available only in certain regions and even terminating the developer account of the application maker.
The rise in digital lending by unregistered and fraudulent apps has been a major concern that has had the government, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as well as the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) in a bind. The issue dates back to 2020 when instances of high-handed loan recovery methods by these apps that lend to unsuspecting customers at high rates pushed many to suicide.
In 2021, Google revised its Play Store developer program policy for financial services apps, mandating additional requirements for personal loan apps in the country.
This included completing a declaration form confirming that they are either licensed by the RBI to provide personal loans and submit a copy of the license, or alternatively, confirming that they only provide a platform to facilitate money lending by duly licensed lenders.
Last year, the company introduced additional requirements for developers offering personal loans in India as facilitators on behalf of Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) and banks.
This required them to also prominently disclose the names of all their partner NBFCs and banks in the app’s description and provide a live website link to the respective websites of partner NBFCs and banks where they are listed as an official agent, as part of the declaration form.
Earlier this month, Google updated its personal loans policy to state that apps that provide or facilitate personal loans will be restricted from accessing sensitive data of consumers such as their contacts, location, photos, videos, files or call logs. The new policy will be effective from May 31, 2023.
"We continue to uplevel our efforts in this area by regularly updating our policies and review processes" a company spokesperson said.
Globally, Google said that it has prevented 1.43 million apps that violated its policies from being published on Google Play in 2022, partly due to its new security features and policy enhancements as well as machine learning systems and app review processes.
The company also banned 173,000 bad accounts, and prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions during the year, it said.
Besides this, Google claimed that it also prevented about 500,000 submitted apps from unnecessarily accessing sensitive permissions over the past three years.
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