Electronic wallets were proposed to be insured: do Russians need it?

The amounts that the state is ready to guarantee to owners of electronic wallets have been announced

The head of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, proposed extending insurance protection to electronic wallets of Russians. The State Duma supported the idea of ​​the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and plans to submit a corresponding bill for discussion by deputies during the spring session. MK found out from experts why the Russian financial market needed a new form of insurance.

According to the monitoring company BusinesStat, at the end of 2021, 38.4 million electronic wallets were registered in Russia. There are no more recent data, but it is clear that after the introduction of sanctions in 2022, foreign operators of this service left our country and the figure most likely changed downward. In Qiwi Bank alone, whose license was revoked by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation last week and the bulk of whose business was in money transfers through electronic wallets, the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) discovered 9.3 million citizens’ electronic wallets, where 4.4 billion were stored rubles The Agency recalled that the money found there is not subject to the law on deposit insurance, so claims for it will be satisfied as part of the third line of creditors. However, they agreed to return the funds. To do this, owners of electronic wallets associated with the bank that has lost its license will need to submit supporting documents. The application will be reviewed within 30 working days, and payments after approval will be made during liquidation procedures.

Such a situation could not escape the attention of the regulator, and Elvira Nabiullina commented on the question of the status of those stored on electronic wallets. “We will study how to bring electronic wallets, people’s funds in electronic wallets also under the wing of insurance protection,” she said. Chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market Anatoly Aksakov has already expressed solidarity with the position of the regulator and promised to submit a bill on insurance of electronic wallets to deputies during the spring session. According to the parliamentarian, people who use electronic wallets should understand that “the money will not be lost if the license of financial organizations is revoked.” Moreover, the service itself is the future of our banking system, because the digital rubles tested by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation are expected to be stored in the electronic wallets of Russians in the future.

The initiative fits well into the government’s action strategy in recent years. “The state is striving to take full control of the circulation of cash and non-cash currency, so it is quite logical that the turn has come to electronic wallets,” says Anna Gondusova, director of client relations at Alfa Capital Management Company.

However, experts disagreed about the benefits of insuring citizens’ electronic wallets. As pointed out by the head of the Association of Electronic Money and Money Transfer Market Participants, Viktor Dostov, despite the fact that wallets are functionally similar to accounts, they differ from them both in content and in terms of regulation. Firstly, this is an instrument aimed at relatively small amounts, not for storage, but for transfers. At the same time, the wallet operator (unlike a bank) must keep 100 percent coverage of its obligations in the account – it cannot, for example, use clients’ money for lending. Insurance is not a bad thing, but it will require costs to create coverage and administer. This will entail an increase in customer costs, the expert warned.

Another part of analysts indicates that the emergence of insurance may lead to increased interest and trust in the service on the part of users. “The extension of insurance to these systems may provoke additional interest in electronic wallets, which are sometimes associated with dubious payments,” says the director of the Higher School of Finance of the Russian Economic University. Plekhanov Konstantin Ordov. The approach to contributions to the insurance fund for owners of electronic wallets is not yet clear, but perhaps the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, through the insurance system, wants to make digital platforms of electronic wallets more transparent and regulated, the scientist suggested.

And according to Freedom Finance Global analyst Vladimir Chernov, it would be better to launch an electronic wallet insurance system similar to the insurance of bank deposits, since this scheme already works well in practice. However, the maximum insurance amount for the service under discussion can be lowered below 0.5–1 million rubles in order to reduce the insurance burden on the DIA. True, the launch of such a system is unlikely to be quick, because first it is necessary to work out all the conditions and approve them, and this will take a lot of time, the analyst stated.