Verification of financial institutions’ websites expands

In October 2019, the Mail.ru portal started to assign a verification mark to websites of credit institutions, microfinance organisations and insurance agents. This is an expansion of the project earlier implemented by the Bank of Russia jointly with Yandex.

Search results on Mail.ru will show a special mark (a blue circle with a tick) to notify consumers that marked websites offer services of financial institutions supervised by the Bank of Russia whose operations are governed by laws protecting the rights and interests of consumers purchasing such financial services. This feature is available both on mobile devices and computers.

The project for marking websites in the Yandex search engine was launched by the Bank of Russia in June 2017. Microfinance organisations were the first to get this special mark. Insurers and other financial market participants also joined the project later on. This tool is meant to help consumers surfing the internet to select legal and compliant providers. It also reduces the risk of financial service consumers being defrauded by illicit companies active on the web, including cloned websites.