Also, because it gives loans to be repaid within a year, you'd better have an immediate plan of how to earn the money back.
I bet this was more useful for, say, small-time merchants who needed to do repairs or get a pack animal or something, and not for the destitute who needed alms.
It doesn't just means « fancy », but also old and rare. In a French speaking context, loose Pléiade prints (the default « fancy » edition) might not gather much interest unless it's sold as a whole collection.
On the other hand any good quality early edition of the well known writers of the 18th or 19th c. is worth at the very least a few hundreds. If you have a first edition print of any of Jules Verne's books by Hetzel, that's worth tens of thousands. A full copy of the first or second edition of the Description de l'Égypte is worth hundreds of thousands.
So the Belgian one is still running. Acceptable collateral [1]:
Jewellery, precious stones, and gold
Luxury watches, gold pocket watches, and antique clocks
Luxury leather goods (handbags, belts, etc. - certain brands only)
Comics and collected editions, and derived objects
Paintings
Objets d'art, sculptures, ivories, bronzes, and porcelain
Silverware
Glassware and crystal bearing a recognised mark
Coins of numismatic value
Wines and spirits of exceptional quality
High-end bicycles in excellent condition
Musical instruments
Now, i didn't grow up poor in Belgium, but these don't immediately strike me as the kind of things that the credit-hungry poor are likely to have lying around the place in any great quantity.
Incidentally, this was an interesting list to translate (with machine help!), because there are some expressions that don't have really good equivalents. The French version distinguishes "montres de poche" from those "à goussets", but i think a gousset is just a particular kind of pocket. I'm not entirely sure what "livres de collections" are, but in context it seems to mean fancy hardback editions of works, like those put out by the Folio Society [2]. Tableaux are paintings, not tables, Google. Cristaux signés seems to mean glass crystal items marked by their manufacturer - apparently British crystal is marked like that [3], but i've never heard anyone be concerned about it - and it seems to be a metonym for high quality. Similarly, for bicycles, "de marque" literally means "branded", but here i think it has a connotation of being made by a fancy manufacturer (Rolls-Royce is a marque, Vauxhall is a make!).
[1] https://www.montdepiete.be/gages-lots
[2] Anyone want an 80 quid Heinlein? https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/stranger-in-a-strange-land.h...
[3] http://www.great-glass.co.uk/glass%20notes/markd-h.htm