Russian Standard Bank stopped giving cash loans to private individuals for the time being; the bank does not deal in mortgage lending, either. The bank’s top executives describe this as a ‘temporary limit on sales of competitive products’ and say they have to make these sacrifices because of changes in their tariffs and terms of credit.

‘It could be that Russian Standard Bank stopped dealing in cash loans due to a number of complaints coming from the law-enforcement agencies and Rospotrebnadzor (the state consumer rights watchdog),’ Director of Accord Invest’s Ural branch Konstantin Selyanin said to UrBC.

‘Quite recently, the bank was confronted with accusations of illegal hidden commissions it allegedly kept taking from its borrowers who’d applied for a mortgage loan. The bank’s management might have decided to partially stop its lending practices until they have given all this money back,’ Mr. Selyanin notes.

‘The global stock market crisis could be another reason. This crisis happened to bring about a global liquidity crisis that, in its turn, made a lot of banks, Russian Standard Bank included, discontinue or cut back on their mortgage lending offers. These were mainly the banks that get most of their liabilities from the European markets, and Russian Standard Bank was, and still is, definitely one of them. The bank must have stopped offering mortgages in order to solve the problems related to the need for refinancing that the crisis made so acute,’ he observes.