From July 1, a new mechanism for responding to financial organizations' claims from their clients will be introduced
On July 1, a law came into force in Russia according to which all banks, insurance companies, non-state pension funds, credit history bureaus and other financial organizations are required to respond to citizens’ requests within 15 working days. If the problem is complex, this period may be extended by another 10 working days. When complaints are received, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation will forward them to those financial institutions about which citizens have complained, and they — banks, microfinance organizations, insurers and others — will have to respond to the complainant and send a copy of the response to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. This will help reduce the processing time for complaints, which currently reaches 60 days, and will force financial institutions to be more attentive to the complaints of their customers. The head of the Service for the Protection of Consumer Rights and Ensuring the Accessibility of Financial Services of the Bank of Russia, Mikhail Mamuta, spoke about the details of the new procedure for citizens’ appeals to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.
—In 2023, we received about 325 thousand complaints. For the first quarter of this year — about 78 thousand requests.
— Over the past year, the number of complaints about banks has decreased by 5.7%. This is the result of new legislation, our behavioral oversight measures, and the gradual increase in customer centricity of market leaders. Thus, the number of complaints about problems related to mortgages has decreased by 6.5%, and about consumer loans by 15.9%.
The number of claims against insurers has decreased by almost 20%, not counting template requests. Such boilerplate complaints are generated by bots, luring customers through advertising on the Internet: for example, they promise to fix the BMR (bonus-malus coefficient, which affects the cost of the policy — “MK”) for money, although a citizen can do this himself and for free from his insurance company.< /p>
At the same time, complaints about fraud through social engineering have become more frequent. This is a painful topic for us. Together with law enforcement agencies, we are making significant efforts to fight this evil. To this end, changes have been made to the legislation, which will come into force on July 24. After this, if the bank allowed the transfer of funds to fraudsters, information about which is already contained in the database of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, it will have to reimburse the client’s money within 30 days after receiving the application. A two-day “cooling period” will also be introduced, during which the bank will not transfer money to a suspicious account. During this time, a person who has fallen under the influence of scammers must come to their senses and cancel the transfer. According to statistics, most victims of attackers manage to realize what happened within two days.
In addition, banks will be allowed to disable access to remote services for droppers — people who cash out stolen money — if information about them came from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. So far, banks receive it only from the regulator.
— Traditionally, more than half of the total number of complaints comes from banks, simply because people interact with them much more actively. Most often they write to us about problems with repaying consumer loans, account restrictions after the court order is canceled and enforcement proceedings are completed; refusal to carry out transactions, blocking of an account. Many complaints are received regarding social engineering and cyber fraud. In addition, banks often act as agents of other financial organizations, and citizens turn to the bank when they have problems with non-bank financial products or services.
— Not so long ago, a big problem was imposing additional services on consumers when lending. Along with the loan, the borrower received a package of insurance and various options (legal advice, subscription to an online movie theater, etc.). With the participation of the Bank of Russia, important changes were made to the legislation, and today lenders are required to include in calculating the full cost of the loan the cost of all goods and services that affect the terms of the agreement: its term, rate. So that a person immediately understands how much borrowed funds will cost him. And additional services, goods or work that do not affect the terms of the contract are issued in a separate application. You can refuse both of them. Moreover, the cooling period during which the borrower can refuse any additional services in the loan agreement has been increased from 14 to 30 days. In addition, banks are obliged to remind the consumer the next day after execution of the contract about the opportunity to refuse additional services, goods and work. The notification may come in the form of an SMS to your phone or another message as specified in the contract, but it must be there.
Thanks to these changes and our checks, as well as individual work with banks, the number of complaints about the imposition of additional services when lending in banks in the first quarter of this year has decreased by half.
— Until recently, this phenomenon was also a serious problem. With the active participation of the Bank of Russia, a law was developed and adopted that introduced requirements for informing consumers when selling financial products, and also gave the regulator the authority to suspend sales and demand the repurchase of products sold with a gross violation of the rules of informing. The financial market knows about this and has already responded, significantly reducing the number of unfair practices. Last year, the number of complaints about misselling decreased by half, in the first quarter of this year, the number of cases of misselling that citizens complained to us about decreased by 70%.However, we are now preparing proposals to increase fines for violations of consumer rights, including misselling, if it still occurs.
— Here, too, complaints are decreasing, except for the stereotyped ones. Most of these stereotyped complaints are caused by the activity of pseudo-experts on social networks. For example, MFO clients, on the advice of these pseudo-experts, send us the same requests to check loan agreements for hidden overpayments, imposed insurance and additional services, even in cases where the MFO does not offer such services.
< p>“More often than not, citizens do not try to sort things out with the financial organization that offended them, but immediately write to the top — to us, to the prosecutor’s office, to the State Duma, for example. Meanwhile, it often happens that a manager at a bank office made a mistake and by investigating the complaint at the bank level, the problem can be resolved. But did you know that before the new law, banks, for example, had no obligation to respond to citizen complaints? Now they will have to understand the situation and respond to the applicant in a fairly short time.
If a citizen has already contacted a financial institution and was not satisfied with its response, then the Bank of Russia itself will consider this complaint. That is, the law excludes the so-called “circling” of the consumer. The main thing is that a copy of the response from the bank, insurance, microfinance organization or other financial organization is attached to the application.
— Your example is about misselling again. As I already said, this practice has become less and less common lately. And we make significant efforts to ensure that the consumer, before signing the contract, receives maximum useful and clearly presented information about the features and risks of the purchased products and services. To achieve this, changes are made to legislation, regulations are issued, and consumer rights protection standards are approved.
If a citizen believes that he was deliberately misled, he can complain to us, attaching a video or audio recording, testimony of witnesses who this is confirmed. At the same time, we see that many socially oriented banks, even in the absence of such confirmation, still meet customers halfway, especially the elderly. Including, I think, because during an internal audit they find out that their employee made an incorrect sale. We also recommended that financial institutions refrain from selling products with an investment component to clients over 70 years of age, unless the citizen came for this product on his own initiative. And we see that, in general, banks adhere to this recommendation.