OREANDA-NEWS In January, Russian banks approved only five percent of applications for consumer loans, compared with 22 percent a year earlier. Izvestia writes about this with reference to the data of the financial marketplace "Compare".

In general, large banks confirm a sharp increase in the number of refusals, however, as indicated in the material, market participants are reluctant to comment on the current trend. As a reason, they point to the record high key interest rate of the Central Bank, which may make interest on loans unbearable for borrowers.

Alexey Volkov, Marketing Director of the National Bureau of Credit Histories (NBKI), explained that the organization does not yet have statistics for January, but the percentage of approvals decreased throughout 2024, which could lead to a record failure rate.

According to him, in addition to the high key interest rate, the regulator has tightened quantitative restrictions for issuing loans to high-risk borrowers, so banks' interest in risky loans has significantly decreased. Ivan Uklein, Senior Director of Banking Ratings at Expert RA, noted that it has become almost impossible to get a second or third loan, and customers with a high debt burden are not given any credit cards.

As calculated by Frank RG, in January, the total volume of loans issued, including mortgages, cash loans, car loans and pos loans, fell to 441 billion rubles, which was the lowest since April 2022.

Experts fear that such a policy will push over-indebted Russians to borrow from microcredit organizations, where the rates are much higher, or to gray creditors. At the same time, the Central Bank has few tools to combat the latter phenomenon.

Earlier, Mikhail Polukhin, director of the ACRA Financial Institution Ratings Group, warned that loan rates in Russia would increase significantly in the first quarter of 2025 due to the lifting of restrictions on the full cost of the loan.