Number of sanctions-related complaints continues to decline in 2022 Q3

The increase was largely attributed to sanctions-related complaints. They peaked in March-April and then started to decrease. Overall, such complaints accounted for 15% for the period under review.

In January-September 2022, the number of complaints against banks rose by 11.6% compared to the previous year and reached 144,000. Of these, 25,000 were associated with sanctions, in particular, with the difficulties faced by holders of foreign currency. However, the number of complaints related to consumer and mortgage lending substantially decreased against the same period of 2021 by 22.8% and 16%, respectively. This can be explained by both a decrease in demand for loans and the entry into force of measures to prevent hard selling of extra services when signing a loan agreement.

The growing number of insurer-related complaints (by 25.8% to total 41,200) is primarily linked to typical and, as a rule, unreasonable complaints against misuses of the bonus-malus coefficient and a greater number of problems arising from the purchase of OSAGO policies and loss settlements amid higher prices for car spare parts and their shortage, seen in March-April.

Microfinance organisations turned out to be one of the segments with a lower number of complaints (a decrease of 7.5% to 34,700). In particular, the number of complaints about hard selling of extra services decreased by 21.1%.

As regards securities market entities, in January-September, the number of complaints increased ninefold to total 19,600 with sanctions-related complaints accounting for the absolute majority (14,600). However, in September, the Bank of Russia received 600 sanctions-related complaints against 5,000 in April.

As before, the main issues of complaints about misselling are improper sales of investment life insurance (ILI) and endowment life insurance (ELI) policies. The number of ILI-related complaints remained roughly the same as last year, but that of ELI-related complaints increased 1.5 times, however, these complaints were mostly focused on earlier acquired policies. Complaints reached their peak in May and then significantly decreased. The Bank of Russia's new power to claim the suspension of misselling and refund deceived consumers will help address this problem.