Rosbank decided to play it safe – Newspaper Kommersant No. 1 (7446) dated 01/09/2023

Kommersant has learned that the fourth systemically important bank in Russia has set up a microcredit company (MCC). At the end of December 2022, Rosbank entered this market by purchasing Polza-Finance LLC. Entering a new niche, according to experts and market participants, is designed to expand the bank’s client base. The profile projects of large banks so far look generally successful, although there are those who, having tried this direction, abandoned it.

Rosbank bought Polza-Finance MCC (authorized capital – 107.8 million rubles, specializes in issuing loans from 15 thousand to 100 thousand rubles), follows from the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. According to the document, the change of ownership took place on December 22, 2022, the previous owner is Andrey Manyukhin. Data on the volume of assets and the number of clients could not be found.

Interviewed by Kommersant, market participants do not know a player with that name. According to Ekaterina Sinogeikina, General Director of the Euroexpert consulting company, now the market multipliers to capital are about 0.7, but if “there is a more or less high-quality portfolio.” Ms. Sinogeikina believes that the MCC could have been sold “for no more than 0.5 capital.” Rosbank did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

Now four systemically important banks have their own MFIs. Two of them appeared in late 2021 – early 2022. These are “A-money”, where 73% belongs to Alfa-Bank, and “Quick purchases” of Sovcombank. TCS Group Holding has had T-Finance for a long time. Of the smaller, but active in the financial market MFO players in the Russian Federation, one can name OTP Bank, Sinara Bank, Uralsib, and Expobank.

Rosbank has not yet dealt with microloans. But large banks have a base of a large number of refusers for their classic products and do not want to lose them as customers, so part of the issuance of unsecured loans goes to related MFIs, says Dmitry Alexandrov, managing director of Ivolga Capital. Rosbank, acquiring the MCC, could be guided by the same logic, the expert believes.

We can talk about an attempt to strengthen the competencies of Rosbank in retail, believes Ivan Uklein, director of banking ratings at Expert RA. “At the end of 2022, there was an activation of large banks in retail lending in anticipation of the introduction of macroprudential limits (in the first quarter of 2023, the Central Bank introduces quantitative restrictions on issuing consumer loans.— “b”), – the expert explains. – We do not expect the bank to have problems in this part with the current introductory, but the regulator clearly announced that macroprudential limits will be tightened.” Among the possible motivations for Rosbank to buy an MCC, Mr. Uklein names “the desire to enrich the client base, to achieve synergy from cross-selling the bank’s product line.”

According to Mr. Aleksandrov, the bank will focus on work in the segment of medium-term loans (IL) – in this case, the current competencies should be enough to process the existing flow of applications. However, the expert draws attention, the company offers to fill out documents to receive them offline – an agent leaves to fill out the application, which “looks like a rather outdated practice for a very technological segment of MFIs.”

At the same time, Elman Mekhtiyev, chairman of the board of SRO MiR, admits that it was the practice of agents visiting potential clients that turned out to be attractive for Rosbank: “This can help the bank reach new clients in new regions of presence.”

Those microcredit subsidiaries of banks that publish their financial results look quite successful. Thus, the net profit of T-Finance for January-September 2022 amounted to 2.5 billion rubles, which is more than that of most independent MFIs. The profit of OTP-Finance at the end of 2021 (4.1 billion rubles) even exceeded the profit of the Russian bank of the same name (2.8 billion rubles).

However, cases are already known when banks that developed the direction of microloans eventually abandoned it. For example, in February 2020, MTS-Bank announced the launch of an “instant” microcredit for 15 thousand. Now, as the bank explained to Kommersant, such a service no longer exists due to “lack of demand among those customers whom the bank is ready to lend.” In 2022, the bank modified the product and uses other business lines as one of the elements, they explained, for example, when lending purchases in partner stores.

Olga Sherunkova, Polina Trifonova