§ 1-4. Who is a consumer, a customer and a service provider?

This section defines three roles that the rest of the Act builds on: consumer, customer and service provider. The role a party has determines which rules apply to them. The concept of consumer is particularly important, since § 1-9 prohibits agreements that put the consumer in a worse position than the Act does.

A consumer is a natural person (a human being, not a company) who enters into the agreement for a purpose that lies mainly outside their own business or profession. There is an extension for credit and personal guarantees. If the loan or the personal guarantee is secured by collateral or similar in an item the person owns, the person is regarded as a consumer in that case too, as long as the item is not mainly used in the business. Example: a person who runs their own business takes out a loan secured by collateral in an asset (an item of value) that does not mainly belong to the business. Under this extension, the person can be regarded as a consumer for the loan.

The customer is the person who is a party to the agreement or uses the service. The customer can be a person or a company. A service provider can never be regarded as a customer. A service provider is a person or company that carries on a business providing financial services or arranging them (financial intermediation). There is one exception. A seller who offers credit only in connection with their own sales, and whose main activity is not financial services, is not a service provider under the Act.

The roles are used throughout the Act. The definition of financial services and financial intermediation, which the service provider delivers, is found in § 1-3. § 1-5 and § 1-7 build on this with concepts relating to payment and credit. § 1-2 (the scope of Chapters 2 to 6) refers to this section, and § 1-1 sets the overall framework for which agreements the Act applies to.