Credit card glossary for Belgium

Belgian law defines only a small share of the words you meet on a credit card contract, and it is the issuer's contract that writes almost everything else. Of the fifty terms in this site's five glossaries, seventeen come from a legal text, nineteen from the contract alone, eight from card network rules, six from no text at all. The word that binds you is not written in the same place as the word that informs you.

This page is the index to five instalments published between 18 August and 26 September 2026: the basics, fees and rates, security and fraud, law and players and perks and uses. It adds, for every term, the source of the rule, which the instalments did not bring together.

Contents:

• Who writes the vocabulary of your card
• The alphabetical index of fifty terms
• Ten words to know before you sign or call
• Which word to look up for your situation
• Vocabulary mix-ups that cost you
• Words missing from this glossary
• The date of each check

Who writes the vocabulary of your card: the law, the networks or the issuer?

The classification below is mine. I redid it on 29 September 2026 by rereading the fifty entries of the five instalments one by one, with a single question: if I dispute this word, where do I read the rule? In a legal or regulatory text. In the rules Visa and Mastercard impose on their members. In the issuer's contract. Or nowhere in a form that binds anyone, which I file under "other": four bodies (FSMA, Febelfin, Ombudsfin, Card Stop) and two kinds of fraud (skimming, phishing).

The contract weighs the most, and it carries words you would take for legal ones. Belgian law does not recognise deferred debit as a category, nor the grace period, as the basics instalment and the fees instalment each establish on their own. Yet these are two of the words that decide the day the money leaves your account and whether interest appears.

The perks instalment is the most lopsided: nine words out of ten are written by the issuer alone, and that is where the money is promised. This asymmetry annoys me. When Beobank shows a fee of 20 euros on one page and 30 euros on another for the same Visa Extra (checked in April 2026), no legal definition settles it, and the cardholder has only two contradictory pages to argue from.

The classification is open to debate, and I say so up front. Exchange commission is filed under "contract" because the contract sets the percentage, even though Regulation (EU) 2019/518 imposes transparency on it. DCC follows the opposite logic: only that regulation frames it, so it goes under "law". Someone else would place those two lines differently, and the gap would not exceed two words.

Alphabetical index of the fifty terms

Each line points to the instalment that defines the term, with a Belgian example and a source.

Which ten words should you know before you sign or call?

Signing, paying, disputing, calling someone: each of these moments has its own words. The entries below give the short version, and the link leads to the instalment for detail.

Credit facility

Book VII of the Code of Economic Law calls a credit facility any contract that puts purchasing power at your disposal, to be drawn in one or several goes, against the promise to repay it.

It is the only legal category of the Belgian credit card. It carries two consequences the word "card" hides: the contract is recorded at the National Bank from the day you sign, and you draw as you please as long as the reserve is not exhausted. The representative example of the Beobank Visa Classic covers 2,150 euros with no fixed term (product page checked on 27 August 2026). Our guide to how a credit card works explains how the contract, the statement and the direct debit fit together.

APR (TAEG)

Bringing the annual cost of a credit down to a single percentage, interest and compulsory fees included: that is what the APR does, and it is the only figure that compares across offers.

On the Beobank Visa Classic it stands at 14.49 % for a borrowing rate of 13.98 %. The 0.51-point gap is the 5-euro annual fee folded into the calculation (rate in force on 09/05/2025). The legal ceiling fell by 1.5 points on 1 June 2025 for credit facilities, according to the FPS Economy announcement of 28 May 2025. Exchange, withdrawals and conversion at the terminal stay outside the calculation, as our pillar on the cost of a card details.

Zero-balance period

Twelve months at most for a credit up to 3,000 euros, sixty beyond: after that, the drawn balance must return to zero.

The FPS Economy starts the clock within two months of the first drawdown. On the Beobank example of 2,150 euros, a minimum repayment of one eighteenth of the balance a month leaves 50.4 % of the capital after twelve payments, about 1,083 euros still owed. Both clauses appear on the same product page. No public issuer document says how they are reconciled.

SECCI

The SECCI is a standardised European form the lender must hand you before any signature, so that two offers compare line by line. The obligation comes from Article VII.70 of the Code of Economic Law.

The one for the Beobank Young Mastercard, opened on 17 September 2026, sets out a 750-euro credit facility at 16.49 % APR, against 20.50 % for an instalment loan of the same amount, and requires an assignment of salary. A SECCI is not a binding offer: the lender stays free to refuse after giving it to you. The route to getting a card places this document in the process.

BNPL

Paying in three instalments at a merchant, outside the credit card and outside any creditworthiness check, is called BNPL, for now only.

Klarna offers three payments and KBC does the same at Carrefour from a 75-euro purchase. Since 1 December 2025, Belgian law bans granting it to a minor, on pain of a fine of up to 800,000 euros or 6 % of turnover. Directive (EU) 2023/2225 will treat BNPL as consumer credit from 20 November 2026. The guide to instalment payments compares the current formulas.

3D Secure

When your banking app asks you to approve an online purchase, it is running 3D Secure: the issuer checks, on a second channel, that the cardholder is the one paying.

Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389 nonetheless provides exemptions. Under Article 16, a remote payment goes through without strong authentication up to 30 euros, as long as the total since the last authentication stays under 100 euros or five operations. A 28-euro purchase can therefore succeed without any code being asked for. The pillar on card security places this mechanism among the other protections.

Chargeback

Chargeback names the procedure by which the network takes back from the merchant a sum already collected, at your issuer's request. The rules are written by Visa and Mastercard.

The admissible grounds revolve around performance: goods never delivered, service not as described, subscription charged after cancellation, double debit. For a Visa or Mastercard credit card, the form is filled in on macarte.be; for a debit card, the request goes through the bank. A transaction you never made falls under another door, Articles VII.38 to VII.45 of the Code of Economic Law. Our article on chargeback details the procedure step by step.

Central Individual Credit Register

Every credit taken out by a Belgian resident, card included, is recorded at the Central Individual Credit Register, the National Bank's register that a lender must consult before granting the next one.

On 31 December 2025 it held 9,983,582 credits for 6,081,385 people, or 63.6 % of adults, of which 44.0 % were credit facilities (National Bank page, reread on 29 September 2026). Removal comes one year after a default is fully settled, ten years at most if it is never cleared. The guide to credit register listings explains the effect on a new application.

Card Stop

078 170 170 blocks any Belgian card at any hour. Standard-rate call, in French, Dutch or English.

At the end of the call you are given a case number, and it will be asked for again if you later dispute transactions. The block compensates nothing: I reread the Card Stop FAQ on 29 September 2026, and none of its questions is about refunds. A card that turns up again can only be unblocked by the issuing bank.

Ombudsfin

Free, entirely in writing, with no power to impose its decision: Ombudsfin mediates disputes with a Belgian financial institution.

It received 8,686 requests in 2025, of which 2,422 were admissible, a record, and 82.5 % of the complaints found justified ended in a successful mediation (annual reports). A request that was not first submitted to the bank is inadmissible.

Which word should you look up for your situation?

The word is chosen by the problem, not by the alphabet.

In this order, before signing anything:

1. Check whether the card opens a credit, so whether a SECCI exists for it.
2. Read the APR, the borrowing rate and the fee on that document, not on the sales page.
3. Cross the minimum repayment with the zero-balance period.
4. Note who to contact if everything goes wrong: the issuer first, Ombudsfin next.

To apply these words to real cards, the comparison tool shows the fee and limit of each Belgian card.

Vocabulary mix-ups that cost you weeks or euros

Some mistakes recur because two words look alike, and they almost always cost time:

• taking deferred debit for a credit facility, when the first is a debit date and the second a contract recorded at the National Bank;
• asking for a chargeback on a transaction you never made, when the law provides another door, with its own deadlines;
• writing to the FSMA, which handles no cardholder complaint on consumer credit, instead of the issuer and then Ombudsfin;
• counting on Card Stop as on an insurance, when it blocks without compensating;
• reading the APR as the price of the card, when exchange, withdrawals and DCC are not in it.

If I could keep only one word of this glossary for a new cardholder, it would be the zero-balance period. The APR is displayed everywhere. The zero-balance period hides in a clause, and it is what tips the contract from a payment tool into long-running debt.

The FPS Economy, for its part, cannot step in between you and your lender, and it does not tell you the outcome of its examination, as the FSMA page on consumer credit cited in the law instalment states. Writing to the wrong body costs weeks, sometimes enough to miss a dispute deadline.

Is anything missing from this glossary?

Yes, and it is better to write it than to let anyone believe the coverage is complete. The CVV has no entry, the debit card is not defined as such, and the Visa and Mastercard networks are described through their rules, not defined. None of these terms belonged to one of the five planned instalments, and I did not want to add them hastily without a dated Belgian source. The comparison of credit cards and debit cards covers most of that blind spot.

The taxation of cashback and miles is missing too. No official page consulted for the perks instalment deals with it, and the Belgian tax authority publishes no guidance on the subject, according to that same instalment. So I write no rule where no text carries one.

How are these definitions checked and kept up to date?

Each instalment carries the date of its last check: 18 August, 27 August, 9 September, 17 September and 26 September 2026. The figures come from issuer pages, the National Bank, the FPS Economy, Wikifin and Ombudsfin's annual reports.

On 29 September 2026 I reread two sources on this page. The National Bank still shows 9,983,582 credits at 31 December 2025, and Card Stop still gives 078 170 170. Issuer rates age faster than legal texts: at my check on 27 August 2026, the Beobank Visa Classic page still showed a rate "in force on 09/05/2025".