Most collective actions are complex because the law is uncertain. This one is the opposite. Since the European Court of Justice ruled in Lexitor in 2019, the principle has been clear: repay a consumer loan early and part of the upfront costs must come back to you. The difficulty lies elsewhere, in the thousands of individual files, the documents nobody has kept, the banks in no hurry to produce them, and a median claim worth €761.
Davide Mercuri is lead counsel on the case in Italy, where Deminor funds the claims and Aggregate manages them operationally. We asked him what running a case like this involves.
Interview by Aurélie Duchêne, Business Development Manager, Aggregate Claims Solutions
Where the case stands
The route to compensation in Italy was not immediate. The Government intervened in 2021 to limit the reach of the ruling, and it took a Constitutional Court decision striking that intervention down to reopen it. Aggregate has been managing the claims since October 2023. New claims have historically arrived at a rate of around 180 per month, although volumes vary. There are currently approximately 3,150 active claims. Around 1,400 claims are in pending or closed proceedings and approximately 800 claimants have been compensated.1
Davide, for readers who are coming to this fresh, what were the banks actually doing?
It is a case brought by consumers against banks and financial entities. When a consumer repaid a loan before its original term, the lender should have reduced the cost of the loan accordingly. I would not say they often failed to do it. I would say they always failed to do it before 2020. If you pay the full fees upfront and you do not keep the loan for its full duration, part of those fees should come back to you. Italy was not the only country where this happened.
This case mainly concerns a specific type of loan, where the pension fund or the employer repays the lender directly. That product was accessible to people who could not obtain ordinary credit because of a poor credit score, and for that reason the fees applied to it were very high.
The law here is fairly settled. So, what is it that makes this case complex?
Several things, and they compound. The individual claim value is small, so you have a very large number of disputes to manage, each for a relatively low amount. The claimants generally have no financial or legal background, so explaining what they are entitled to receive, what they need to do, and what Deminor, Aggregate and the lawyers will do for them takes time and patience.
Then there are the documents. You need the credit agreement, the early settlement calculation, and signed mandates. Most of the time, the claimant has none of these. I know from direct experience that you can explain, you can wait, you can call them several times, and they still cannot find anything. So, you must request the documents from the bank, and the bank knows perfectly well what comes next, so it is not in a hurry. It has ninety days to reply, and it often uses them. If you do not want to wait ninety days, you send reminders. I know that Deminor has hundreds of open requests at any given moment, and every one of them has to be tracked, chased and matched back to the right file when it finally arrives. None of that is legal work, but no legal work can start until it is done.
Long before any of that, the case had to exist publicly. It runs under its own external name, with a dedicated website and FAQ page, and a marketing agency making first contact with claimants. Looking back, how much did that early groundwork matter?
Looking back, I think the groundwork laid by your team was absolutely critical, and it's something people often underestimate because it happens so early on the project.
From an outside perspective, credibility is step one. If a project doesn't have a solid, professional website, claimants simply won't trust it. Online reputation is crucial. The team's approach to communication was also key. By using simple, accessible language across the branding and outreach, they made sure consumers actually understood what they were reading.
And finally, I think that having a marketing agency make first contact only works if there's a well-prepared team behind it. The team built a structure that was fully briefed on the case, allowing them to respond quickly and clearly whenever claimants asked for clarification.
Take me through what happens to a claimant once they do register.
The first step is to explain what they may be entitled to and to assess whether they are eligible, which you do before seeing a single document. That is done by interviewing them about the loan and how it was repaid.
Once they are eligible, they sign the contracts and hand over whatever documents they still have. In parallel, Deminor requests the rest from the bank. When the file is complete, our law firm runs a short due diligence process. We check the date of the contract, to establish the applicable law, we check the fees that were actually paid, we establish when the loan ended, and we verify the calculation the bank made at the time. From there the claim amount can be calculated and a formal payment request goes out.
If the bank does not pay, mediation is mandatory in Italy before you can go to court. Most of the time the bank does not even show up. After that the court proceedings start, and the judgment comes after about a year, sometimes eighteen months, sometimes two years. Along the way banks often propose settlements, which have to be managed as well, including going back to individual claimants for their signature. Then the recovered amounts must be distributed correctly, which means keeping track of every single refund.
A mandatory step that costs more than the lawsuit it precedes sounds like a structural problem for a claim worth a few hundred euros. How did you get around it?
It is hard to explain, but yes, that mandatory step costs more than filing the lawsuit itself. On a claim of this size, it simply does not work. So, we needed a way to bundle claims together and run group mediations, spreading that cost rather than charge it to each file. That was one of the challenges we managed to overcome.
Suppose there had been no claims management team on this case. What would have happened?
You could not have done it. There is no other way. Without good software you can have five, ten, or fifteen people working on it and there will always be disorder, because you cannot organise everything by hand. You need a well-built CRM, customised for the case, and you need someone whose job it is to manage all of it. Assuming a law firm were to handle such a massive volume of requests for assistance, that means either building the whole thing yourself or accepting that the case will run at a fraction of the volume.
You have described organisation as the key ingredient. Is there anything else you would put next to it?
The accessibility of the technology, for the reason I just mentioned. The platform holds records for every one of the thousands of claims in the portfolio, allowing both claim management and legal teams to leverage this data in several ways. It can generate the documents required to escalate a claim, while also giving the team real-time visibility into the portfolio's performance. Thanks to this technology, both teams can deliver high-quality services at scale, identify potential issues in each pipeline early, and act before they become more serious.
Moreover, it enables the operational team to keep thousands of consumers informed through tailored notifications whenever a milestone in their claim is reached. That last point matters more than people assume. Claimants may not fully appreciate the complexity and duration of litigation, but they deserve to be kept regularly informed about the progress of their case. On the scale at which this project operates, providing that service is only possible with the right system behind it.
Did the process look like this on day one?
Not at all, and there was a fair amount of experimentation. At the beginning the team tried an online form, asking claimants to enter their loan data themselves. It did not work. They simply would not fill it in. This is a particular type of claimant, and the claim management structure had to adapt to them rather than expect them to adapt to it.
Once the platform was live and fully operational, managing claims from signing through to collection became possible at scale. From there, we continued to refine the collection process whenever we identified something that was not working as well as it should. Fortunately, the platform was highly flexible and easy to adapt, which meant we could keep improving it as our experience with the case developed.
Last one. Another case of this type comes along. Would you want a claims management team alongside you?
For sure.
1 Operational figures reflect the case status in September 2026.
