Debtors may, at any time, instruct their payment service provider to limit direct debits on their accounts:

• Temporality: debtors notify their payment service provider of a time limit after which a given direct debit should be cancelled. This is the case for instalments, where debtors know beforehand the year and month of the last instalment;
• Periodicity: debtors notify their payment service provider that a given direct debit collection may only be debited from their account, for instance, once a day/week/month/quarter/year or twice a year;
• Maximum amount: debtors may set up a cap for a given direct debit, either because they know exactly how much will be debited (e.g. rents, instalments and subscriptions), or because, given that they know their usual expenses with utilities (e.g. water, telephone and electricity), they do not want unreasonable amounts to be debited;
• Positive and/or negative list of creditors: debtors may restrict direct debit collections to a limited group of creditors (positive lists of creditors) or to block any direct debits coming from specific creditors (negative lists of creditors);
• Full blocking: debtors may request their payment service provider to block all direct debits on their payment account.

Debtors may instruct their payment service provider to put in place all of these limits. In some cases, it is also possible to set up time limits and maximum amounts per collection at an ATM of the Multibanco network.