Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the European Standardised Information Sheet (ESIS), a mortgage credit document, as a bureaucratic artefact that mediates relationships, enacts governance, and reflects neoliberal financialisation. It argues that despite its aims to empower borrowers and move beyond traditional “fine print” practices, the ESIS reveals tensions between transparency ideals and the specific temporalities and epistemologies of practice.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the European Standardised Information Sheet (ESIS), a mortgage credit document, as a bureaucratic artefact that mediates relationships, enacts governance, and embodies a neoliberal framework of financialisation. Mandated under Directive 2014/17/EU on credit agreements for consumers relating to residential property and implemented in Romania in 2016, the ESIS aims to standardise pre-contractual mortgage information, promoting transparency and comparability across offers.

The analysis, drawing on fieldwork in Bucharest between July 2019 and September 2020, explores three key dimensions of the ESIS. First, as a relational mediator, the document positions borrowers in a dual role: as informed decision-makers who consent to terms and as regulated subjects bound by the bank’s conditions. Despite the promise of informed decision-making, borrowers remain in an asymmetrical relationship with limited negotiating power. Second, as a governance tool, the ESIS embodies a regulatory risk-management approach, detailing interest rates, repayment schedules, and contingencies, while imposing clear accountability on borrowers. Third, as a sociopolitical artefact, the ESIS reflects a neoliberal paradigm where financial products are framed as individualized and depersonalised, obscuring the structural constraints shaping borrowers’ choices.

While the ESIS moves away from the traditional “fine print” approach of financial documents, striving to genuinely inform and empower borrowers, the paper argues that it nonetheless reveals a tension between ideals of transparency and temporalities and epistemologies specific to the logic of practice.