Financial Consumer Protection
Consumer protection includes both supervisory responses (to enquiries) and proactive measures; the latter have been effective since 2018 and provide for setting rules for the conduct of financial institutions which regulate their customer relations and control their compliance with such rules.
The proactive measures help prevent damage to consumers’ interests before it is done.
To implement conduct supervision, the Bank of Russia elaborated a methodology and toolbox for proactive conduct supervision. In 2018, the Bank of Russia was authorised to carry out control exercises which simulate purchases of financial products/services; this helps reveal misconduct and violations of law by financial market participants.
Pursuant to the laws regulating financial consumer protection, the Bank of Russia established targets for conduct supervision which include, among other things, unlawful sales of financial instruments, offers of the services of foreign companies, transfers to another NPF using forged documents, fraudulent borrowing from an MFO and unfair debt collection practices.
The objectives of conduct supervision are:
- Enforcement of the observation of consumers’ rights and lawful interests.
- Increase in the accessibility and quality of financial services.
- Enhancement of consumer confidence in financial market participants.
- Mitigation of consumer mistreatment risks and efficient risk management.
As part of conduct supervision, the Bank of Russia analyses and assesses contractual relations with customers and can advise on fine-tuning the contractual framework (within its remit). Conduct supervision exercises also target the consumer protection systems and procedures of supervised entities, in particular, enquiry processing, dispute settlement, etc.
Follow this link to send an enquiry to the Bank of Russia.
To address the Bank of Russia follow these steps:
- make sure that the issue is within the Bank of Russia’s remit;
- clearly formulate the problem;
- describe the events in chronological order;
- name the entities against which you are filing a complaint;
- attach any available files: documents, photos, video or audio files, etc.;
- provide your contact details.