Banking: the overdraft is no longer a safety valve. It is becoming a financial product.

For decades, the bank overdraft was a kind of silent pact between the customer and the bank. A safety valve. A buffer between two due dates. Not an ideal solution, but a human reality: life does not wait for the date of the transfer.

But from 20 November 2026, the overdraft will no longer be an adjustment. It will become a consumer credit. Officially. Legally. Commercially. And that shift, beneath its technical appearance, says something profound:

We will not help you. We will lend to you.

Why is the overdraft becoming a consumer credit?

The shift does not come from one minister's isolated decision. It comes from the European Union. Directive (EU) 2023/2225 of 18 October 2023, known as CCD2, repeals the 2008 directive and extends consumer credit rules to products that had until then been excluded: overdrafts, facilities repayable in less than a month and credits below 200 euros.

France transposed it through ordinance no. 2025-880 of 3 September 2025, completed by a corrective ordinance of 2 December 2025. The new rules apply from 20 November 2026.

In practice, from that date, the bank will have to carry out a prior creditworthiness assessment for any opening or extension of an overdraft, including where that overdraft is below 200 euros and lasts less than a month. It will have to provide information on the cost of the credit. And the granting of unsolicited credit becomes prohibited: an institution will no longer be able to set up a new overdraft facility on its own initiative, or raise its ceiling, without the customer's explicit agreement.

The word is out: creditworthiness assessment. What used to be an arrangement becomes a file.

The veneer of "protection"

The government talks about preventing over-indebtedness. About protecting the consumer. About transparency on the APR and the repayment terms. It rightly points to one real gain: the removal of the flat-rate minimum fees, those fixed charges that forty of the eighty-six banks surveyed levy on small overdrafts, in the range of 1.50 to 13 euros, and that UFC-Que Choisir has for years called immoral fees.

But the reality lies elsewhere: behind the good intentions, the point is to turn fragility into a regulated market.

From 200 euros onward, the bank will have to assess creditworthiness, examine income, consult the incident registers. A 400 euro overdraft may be enough to make a file ineligible if the debt ratio exceeds 30 %.

In other words: if you have little, you will have even less access to this small safety net. And you will have to justify why you are poor.

An outsourcing of social policy

What was already striking is that banks profited from overdraft fees. What is happening now is a normalization of that mechanism. A framework. A set of rules that does not come to relieve, but to write the need into a logic of scoring, of profitability, of compliance.

The State no longer plays its part. It does not protect. It delegates. It regulates poverty instead of fighting it.

It is a transfer of responsibility, clean and silent: it is no longer public policy that supports, it is banking contracts that sort.

Should we fear increased banking exclusion?

The question has been put in black and white in the Senate. In a written question filed on 1 January 2026, senator Pierre-Alain Roiron raises the alarm about this creditworthiness assessment imposed for the smallest of overdrafts and fears increased banking exclusion, at a time when, he recalls, 5.4 million French people live below the poverty line.

The government replied on 12 March 2026. It gives an assurance that the requirements will be lightened for small, short-term amounts: for an overdraft below 200 euros, consulting the incident register would remain optional, under what it calls a proportionate regime. The wording is meant to reassure. Above all, it confirms that the principle has been set: even the smallest overdraft now falls under a logic of assessment.

A proportionate regime is still a regime. You do not proportion a safety valve. You proportion a credit.

What does this measure really reveal?

Credit is not the problem. The problem is what we are trying to replace with it.

France could have invented a republican mechanism, temporary, automatic, to answer modest unforeseen events. A right to a social advance. A short-term solidarity.

Instead, it chose to standardize debt. It offers banks a new product: the management of the end of the month. And too bad for those who do not have the right file.

A proposal: a right to an advance, not a credit

We could do it differently. Create a social advance fund accessible with no interest, guaranteed by the State, triggered automatically for small amounts and capped at essential uses (rent, health, food). A tool for economic breathing room, not a disguised annuity.

It would be simple. Fair. Transparent. And above all: human.

But as long as we confuse protection with compliance, we will address hardship with a barrage of regulations. And the margins of survival will keep feeding the product lines.

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Sources

• Directive (EU) 2023/2225 of 18 October 2023 on consumer credit agreements: EUR-Lex.
• Transposition into French law, ordinance no. 2025-880 of 3 September 2025: Légifrance, and corrective ordinance no. 2025-1154 of 2 December 2025: Légifrance.
• Creditworthiness assessment for any overdraft, including one below 200 euros, and the government's reply of 12 March 2026: written question from senator Pierre-Alain Roiron, French Senate.
• Changes to the way overdrafts work, thresholds and the absence of any imposed debt ratio: Fédération bancaire française.
• Cost of the overdraft, flat-rate minimum fees and the usury rate: La finance pour tous.
• The 20 November 2026 timetable: CNews.