Balancing short-term risks and long-term goals of state regulation is a task that is always unpleasant for the regulator, especially in politicized issues. In this sense, the last document approved by the Board of Directors of the Bank of Russia in 2021 is interesting – “Priority areas for increasing the availability of financial services in the Russian Federation for the period 2022–2024”: it shows how difficult and uncomfortable such a choice can be. This is the second document of the Central Bank on this delicate issue, the first was valid in 2018-2020 and was extended due to the pandemic for 2021; however, over three years, both the possible social resonance and the difficulties of the regulator associated with this document have grown.
They look something like this. On the one hand, there is a “big” effect: the spread of financial services creates long-term welfare in society, and this is a universal principle. On the other hand, when the Central Bank lists those who are supposed to pay special attention to the implementation of the “directions”, it coincides with the list of categories of residents of the Russian Federation, in relation to which “credit” and “poverty” are synonyms: these are residents of rural, sparsely populated and hard-to-reach territories, people with disabilities and low-income groups. The statement “we will help increase the debt load of the most vulnerable strata of the population” is hardly politically attractive – as, indeed, the reverse slogan “do not let the poor into the banks”. Another aspect of what is happening is the role of the Central Bank itself in this activity: it is reasonable to assume that the “sufficiency” of the penetration of financial services is a matter of the market strategy of specific players. Since the Central Bank is in no way ready to pay extra to banks for opening offices in the taiga or in economically depressed areas, the question of whether an office is needed there, in theory, should be resolved automatically, and not always in a pleasant way. A more high-spirited (and high-risk – and less technological and scrupulous) financial business, entering these territories first, first offers services there, which the consumer reasonably seem to be a slightly veiled robbery (see microfinance) – and usually only much later erects something shining there. neon and cheap plastic. The Central Bank’s strategy assumes a reduction in this period, but it is impossible to reduce it to zero. To eliminate this effect, the Central Bank comes up with all the new measures – up to the “self-prohibition” in the credit history bureaus to receive online loans and the introduction of the institution of a “living wage protected from write-offs”.
Finally, 2018 differs from 2022 in that now the Bank of Russia is unlikely to need quick success: the growth rates of consumer credit in the Russian Federation are already exorbitant. To the credit of the regulator, he does not retreat from the main principle – since financial services are long-term beneficial to everyone, the document discusses their development, and not limitation, and tacitly recognizes problems on the way by using the term “balanced growth”: “balanced” here means not only “problem-free”, but and “less fast”.
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