Definition
Del credere is a mercantile law term describing an arrangement in which an agent or factor, in exchange for an additional commission, guarantees to the principal that buyers to whom goods are sold on credit will pay what they owe. If the purchaser defaults, the del credere agent is personally liable to the principal for the unpaid price.
The arrangement has two interlocking components: (1) a del credere agent — an agent for the sale of goods who assumes the credit risk of buyers — and (2) a del credere commission — the higher rate of compensation paid to the agent in exchange for that guarantee. The guarantee is contingent in character: the agent's liability arises only if the buyer fails to pay, and only when the debt has become due. The agent is not a co-debtor with the buyer; the obligation is more akin to guaranty than to primary suretyship.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Engaging, when selling goods on credit, to guarantee to the principal that the purchaser is solvent. The seller is otherwise responsible for the debt."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "An agreement by which an agent or factor, in consideration of an additional premium or commission (called a del credere commission), engages, when he sells goods on credit, to insure, warrant, or guarantee to his principal the solvency of the purchaser, the engagement of the factor being to pay the debt himself if it is not punctually discharged by the buyer when it becomes due."
The common definitions describe the mechanism accurately, but they understate a legal distinction that matters in practice: the del credere agent's liability is secondary and contingent — triggered only by the buyer's failure to pay — placing it closer to guaranty than to indemnity or suretyship in the primary sense. Characterizing it simply as guaranteeing "solvency" also overstates the obligation: the agent warrants that the debt will be paid, not that the buyer is generally creditworthy.
Common Confusion
Del credere is sometimes conflated with ordinary suretyship or with indemnity. The distinction is meaningful. A surety is typically bound alongside the primary obligor from the moment of the undertaking; a del credere agent's obligation is collateral and secondary, arising only upon the buyer's default after the debt falls due. The arrangement also differs from an indemnity in that it is triggered by the buyer's failure to perform a specific obligation rather than by loss generally. Some historical sources use "guarantee" and "warranty" interchangeably with del credere, but the precise legal character of the obligation — whether it requires a separate writing under the Statute of Frauds — was a recurring question in English and American courts. Because the agent is transacting in its own name in part, courts sometimes held the del credere promise outside the Statute's reach.
Why It Matters in Research
Del credere arrangements appear primarily in commercial and agency law sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when factor-based trade was the dominant mode of mercantile commerce. Researchers working in this period should expect the term to appear in shipping and factor records, commission merchant disputes, and early commercial court opinions. Several things shift over time:
First, the role of the factor as a distinct commercial actor declined significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as direct sales channels developed. References to del credere in twentieth-century sources are often historical or comparative rather than describing live commercial practice.
Second, the Statute of Frauds question — whether a del credere undertaking is a "promise to answer for the debt of another" requiring writing — was genuinely contested and resolved differently across jurisdictions. Researchers tracing a particular dispute must identify the jurisdiction and applicable period before assuming how courts characterized the arrangement.
Third, the term survives in modern commercial and agency law treatises in discussions of agent liability and risk allocation, but may appear without the Italian phrase, described instead as an agent "guaranteeing" buyer performance. Index searches limited to "del credere" will miss these discussions.
Fourth, Law Mind corpus materials in insurance law may use the phrase analogically, borrowing its structure to describe premium-for-guarantee arrangements outside the factor context. Flag these uses carefully; they are structural analogies, not the classic doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge strongly on the core definition: an agent guarantees purchaser payment in exchange for additional commission. Burrill's is the most analytically precise, noting the agreement "insure[s], warrant[s] or guarantee[s]" solvency — flagging the terminological ambiguity that troubled courts. Burrill cites Paley on Agency and Russell on Factors as foundational authorities, both primary sources worth consulting directly.
Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence emphasize the Italian origin and the equivalence to "guaranty" or "warranty" and the Scots "warrandice," which is useful context for tracing the term across common law traditions. The Anderson entry is fragmentary in the corpus excerpt but confirms the core trust-and-credit characterization.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is the Statute of Frauds debate and the question of whether the del credere commission must be separately documented. They also do not address the decline of the factor system or flag how the doctrine mapped onto emerging corporate agency structures. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as starting points that need supplementation from the treatise literature, particularly Paley on Agency and Benjamin on Sales, both of which are cited in the sources.
Jurisdictional Note
English law historically treated the del credere promise as outside the Statute of Frauds on the theory that the agent contracts partly in its own name and the guarantee is incidental to a broader agency relationship. American courts divided on this question; some states applied the Statute directly. The modern relevance of the doctrine varies significantly by jurisdiction depending on whether the factor-principal commercial relationship is still a recognized category in local agency statutes.