‘The best part of complaints we get about banks have to do with issuance of loans and credit cards. A lot of such claims concern the credit cards provided by Russian Standard and Home Credit Ltd. to their bona fide borrowers,’ reports Chairman of Yekaterinburg Consumer Rights Committee Andrei Artemyev.

‘Home Credit Ltd., for example, gave one of its clients a credit card with a 40,000 RUR limit and informed them that insurance was the obligatory part of the deal. The sum of the insurance payment was withdrawn from this credit card account. In a few months, the client owed the bank something around 15,000 RUR due to the bank charging the interest rate and the monthly commission for the maintenance of the account that amounted to 1.5% of the whole sum. All these commissions and ‘hidden’ interest rates create crushing terms for the borrowers,’ Mr Artemyev said.