Chilean mortgage loan market is characterized by debtors' limited understanding of financial information an low level of loans' renegotiation. As a result, there is a high risk that consumers are missing benefits from economic opportunities. That's why Chilean financial institutions must, by law, send to their customers every three months, a Mortgage Statement designed by the regulator.
This policy paper is an executive summary of a study that shows qualitative and quantitative evidence about the impact of Mortgage Statements on consumers' refinancing decisions. This research also delivers an option for its redesign, based on an exhaustive review of literature on financial consumer decisions, best international practices about the design of financial information booklets and, a qualitative evaluation of the current mortgage statement.

Through a random experiment, the investigation tested the impact of the prototype and the current mortgage statement on consumers' decisions to scan loan alternatives in the Chilean mortgage market. The results suggested an increase of 23.3 percentage points (between 18.3-28.4% considering the marginal error) in the probability of quoting new loan offers in comparison to those exposed to the current statement.

Considering the amount mortgage market in Chile, the redesigned mortgage statement may increase the likelihood of quoting loans for approximately 200,000-300,000 people every three months –assuming the external validity of the experiment-. Based on these findings, the study proposes a regulatory reform to redesign the mortgage statement in force.
This policy paper summarises the main findings of a more extended Report. The report is only available in Spanish, and it can be requested to the Behavioural Economics Unit of SERNAC.