Central Bank forecasting fall in banks' retail portfolios by 10% in 2015 - CB department head
MOSCOW. Sept 22 (Interfax) - The Central Bank of Russia is expecting that in 2015 the reduction in the retail portfolio of banks will amount to 10%, the director of the Central Bank's financial stability department, Sergei Moiseyev, said at the Retail Risk Management 2015 forum on Tuesday.
"We characterize the situation as a classic boom and fall. Now, as you see, the market is in decline. We are forecasting that for 2015 loans to private individuals will fall by 10% per annum on average," Moiseyev said.
He said that the recovery of growth is expected in the middle of 2016.
"We assume that those measures that were taken were taken in a timely fashion. This was still before oil prices declined," Moiseyev said. After the Central Bank acted, the riskiest loan segment - subprime - "began to deflate quite quickly."
"If we are talking about the quality of loans issued in 2015, I would say that everything there looks fairly dramatic on one hand. On the other, the issuance volumes there were not large; as a result this will not have a substantial effect on portfolio quality," Moseyev said.
Back in June 2015, Moiseyev had said the volume of unsecured loans would shrink 10% this year. He forecast that consumer lending might begin to recover in Q1 2016.