In Russia, cash loans have risen sharply in price: the full cost of such loans as of March 1, 2024 reached 31.4% per annum. This was reported by Kommersant with a link to data from the Scoring Bureau.
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This figure exceeded the level of March 2022, when the cost of consumer loans rose to 30.7% as the Russian central bank raised the key rate to 20% due to sanctions imposed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Moreover, , the current rates are the highest since the fourth quarter of 2014, when the Russian Central Bank began publishing quarterly statistics.
Cash loans for Russians began to become more expensive in July 2023, when the Russian Central Bank began raising the key rate to cope with the fall in the ruble exchange rate and rising prices. However, since December last year, the refinancing rate has remained the same, and the total cost of loans in the first two months of 2024 increased by 1.5 percentage points.
“The change in the average rate on new loans is an inertial process. Decisions on applications for loans could have been made by lenders during the period of expected growth of the key rate, and consumers are only now receiving loans based on previously made decisions, which leads to an increase in the average value of the total cost of the loan,” explained Oleg Lagutkin, CEO of Scoring Bureau.< /p>
Demand for loans
Despite the rising cost of loans for Russians, high demand for them remains. According to the financial company Frank RG, in February Russians took out loans for a total amount of 495 billion rubles, which is 9% more than in February 2023.
At the same time, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the segment of borrowers with debt burden of more than 50% accounted for 45% of all cash loans, according to data from the Russian Central Bank.