In January—March 2023, the Bank of Russia received 89,000 complaints from financial consumers and investors, which is 2.5% less than over the same period last year.*

The number of complaints against banks was down (-7.4%) mostly because of applications on sanction-related issues regarding foreign currency restrictions, loan repayment holidays and so on. The number of complaints about consumer and mortgage lending declined as well, namely by 3.7% and 28.6%, respectively.

Net of typical complaints about the adjustment of the bonus-malus coefficient, the number of complaints against insurers decreased by 8%. These widespread complaints are filed by intermediaries for a fee, but knowingly, they cannot be settled as they do not contain data on applicants’ compulsory motor third party liability insurance policies (for details, refer to the publication on the website Financial Culture).

The number of complaints against microfinance organisations (MFOs) was up by 36.8%, specifically due to more frequent applications from people who became victims of fraudsters raising microloans on their behalf. To address this problem, the Bank of Russia obliged MFOs to combine several methods for the identification of a borrower. In addition, the authorities are considering a draft law on people's right to set and cancel self-bans on loans and microloans. Another reason for the increase was unjustified complaints about hard selling of extra services and debt recalculation claims sent because of false information on the internet (for details, refer to the publication on the website Financial Culture).

The number of complaints against professional securities market participants dropped 1.8 times, which was mainly because the number of sanction-related complaints against brokers was down two times.

The structure of complaints about misselling (+3.5%) was dominated by endowment and investment life insurance (+50.7% and +8.5%, respectively). However, the applications were mostly related to policies purchased over previous years and filed as the return on them was below expectations. In contrast, there was a downward trend in complaints about sales of brokers’ and trustees’ products and services under the guise of deposits.

* From the beginning of 2023, the Bank of Russia introduced an enhanced method for taking into account repeating complaints. To ensure data comparability, the statistical series of complaints for previous periods were recalculated using the updated method. As before, one application may be taken into account as several complaints if it is related to more than one problems or organisations.