Microfinance organizations (MFOs) from the beginning of 2023 began to refuse to issue loans more often due to the new rules of the Central Bank (CB), Izvestia found out.
As a result of the introduction of macroprudential limits from the beginning of 2023, borrowers with a high debt load began to receive refusals to receive medium-term consumer loans, Aleksey Perederiy, head of the risk management department at MigCredit, told Izvestia. According to him, the number of approvals in this segment has decreased by about 10%.
The trend towards an increase in the share of refusals to issue loans is indeed observed, confirmed Sergey Vesovshchuk, CEO of Moneyman. If we talk about the dynamics of the approval level, then in the segment of new customers in January of this year it averaged 10%, while a year earlier for the same period it was 15–20%. In the segment of repeat customers, this figure is at an average level of 70-80% against last year’s 85%, he said.
Since the beginning of the year, the approval rate for new clients has decreased by more than 3 p.p. relative to December, and for repeated ones – only by 0.5 percentage points, shared the general director of the IFC Zaimer Roman Makarov. He also explained that this is due to the introduction of new requirements of the Central Bank: now it has become unprofitable for the market to issue loans to citizens with a high debt burden.
For the same reason, the company had to tighten the scoring settings (assessment of solvency), Andrey Kleimenov, head of Eqvanta Group, noted, adding that as a result, the volume of loans decreased by 4%. Credit bureaus see a similar trend in the banking sector.
On February 20, the regulator set the same macroprudential limits for unsecured loans for the second quarter. The Central Bank noted: in January, banks and MFIs began to adapt to the new measures. Some market participants will have to tighten lending standards in order to comply with the limits, which may lead to a reduction in the volume of unsecured consumer loans in February-March by 5-10%.
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