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- Part of the reckoning: The Central Bank will punish banks with increased fees for deceiving customers
Part of the reckoning: The Central Bank will punish banks with increased fees for deceiving customers
From October 1, banks will start paying more to the Mandatory Deposit Insurance Fund (FOSF) if the regulator finds gross violations in their work with clients, Izvestia found out. In particular, we are talking about incomplete disclosure of the terms and risks of products, the imposition of services and the sale of complex investment instruments to untrained people. Even one such case can worsen the bank's supervisory assessment to the level of "doubtful". If it persists for two consecutive quarters, the Central Bank will oblige the credit institution to transfer four times the usual amount to the deposit insurance system, in addition to the fine for violation. Whether banks will mislead customers less often is in the Izvestia article.
What will change for banks from October 1
In Russia, the responsibility for banks for violating the rights of customers will be tightened. Starting from October 1, the unscrupulous behavior of a credit institution can lead not only to an order or a fine, as it was before, but also to an increase in mandatory contributions to the Deposit Insurance Fund.
The new measure concerns the risk of unfair behavior (RNP). Each quarter, the Central Bank evaluates the condition of banks, including how well they comply with the requirements when working with clients. If, according to the results of the analysis, the credit institution receives a low score on the RNP and retains it for two quarters, it will pay an increased contribution to the Federal Tax Service. The additional rate for the violator will be 300% of the base rate. In other words, instead of one basic payment, the bank will pay four at once, the press service of the Central Bank told Izvestia.
As an example of gross violations, the Central Bank cited the repeated provision of incomplete or unreliable information about the contract, transaction and related risks during the year. They may also include the sale of complex investment instruments without the required testing of the client. The regulator does not plan to publish a full list of such violations: in each case, a comprehensive assessment of the situation will be carried out.
Recently, the number of complaints related to additional services in lending has been growing rapidly, and unscrupulous players are not deterred even by increased fines. In the first half of 2026, the number of such appeals doubled year-on-year, Izvestia wrote. In some cases, fees on such products can be extremely high, and some banks sell insurance to customers with a 25-fold markup.
The new rules will become a significant economic incentive for large credit institutions to change their sales practices, experts interviewed by Izvestia believe. The additional fee is not a one—time fine, but a fixed cost that will have to be borne for at least six months. In addition, the larger the amount of deposits, the higher the payment amount will be. For large players, additional costs in some cases can amount to billions of rubles, said Vasily Kutyin, Ingo Bank's Director of Analytics.
Therefore, when the new requirements come into force, banks will have an additional reason to monitor not only financial performance, but also how their employees sell products, disclose risks and select them for a specific client, said Andrey Sanakoev, senior lecturer at the Department of Global Financial Markets and Fintech at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.
How the new rules will affect banks
At the same time, market participants point out the possible risks of the new system. The Association of Russian Banks (ARB) fears that violations that do not indicate systemic dishonesty of a credit institution may fall under its action. In particular, the bank may several times miss the deadline for responding to customer requests due to technical failures or local problems with information systems.
If at the same time a credit institution has already been fined for other violations in the field of consumer protection, this may in certain cases affect the final assessment of the risk management system. According to the banking community, such technical episodes should not have the same weight as the systematic imposition of services or concealment of risks from customers, said Angela Khanachevskaya, head of the analytical department of ARB.
If the bank fears a deterioration in the assessment, it may focus on documenting compliance rather than changing the sales model itself. For example, new warnings and consent forms can be added to the client, while maintaining the previous motivation of employees to sell more expensive or complex products, said Vladimir Chernov, analyst at Freedom Global.
Therefore, it is important to check not only the documents, but also the actual practice: the content of consultations, the independence of testing, the repeatability of violations and reasonable customer complaints. A single caption under the warning by itself does not show whether a person has understood the risks of the product, the expert added.
At the same time, the Central Bank assured that the assessment would not be issued automatically. The regulator intends to take into account how much the violation is associated with an increased risk, what measures the bank is taking to eliminate it, and how serious the problem is. This should separate technical errors from cases that indicate a systemic flaw in the management of the RNP.
The Bank of Russia also stressed that credit institutions had enough time to prepare for the introduction of new measures — the regulator began to evaluate them according to such criteria (so far without increased fees) on October 1, 2025. Market participants also agree with the regulator. According to Elena Samokhina, Director of the Banking Development Department of the Association of Banks of Russia, the new rules were discussed for a long time before their introduction. Now it remains to see how the mechanism will be implemented in practice.
What does this mean for customers
In order to avoid increased fees, banks will have to strengthen internal control over sales. Theoretically, credit institutions can try to compensate for this through fees or less favorable terms of individual products, but a noticeable overall increase in the cost of services due to new requirements should not be expected, says Andrey Sanakoev from Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. In his opinion, in a competitive environment, it is easier for banks to change their sales practices rather than pass costs on to customers.
In addition, they may simply close access to complex investment products for non-shareholders in order to avoid excessive regulatory attention, added Yaroslav Kabakov, Director of Strategy at Finam.
However, instead of restructuring business processes, banks may try to simply circumvent the new rules. Additional fees can be added to services simply by changing the tariff schedule. For example, it is possible to charge an additional fee for recalculating payment deadlines when the debt repayment schedule is ahead of schedule, Ekaterina Kosareva, managing partner of VMT Consult, warned.
The financial effect of the new measure for large credit institutions will be tangible, but not so great as to completely change their business model, explained Valeria Popova, senior analyst at the Rikom-Trust investment company. Therefore, the effectiveness of the measures will depend primarily on how well the entire mechanism will work.
If banks try to circumvent the rules by complying with them only "on paper," the burden on the regulator will increase, experts warned. However, if the Central Bank succeeds in successfully identifying such schemes, the market will indeed change for the better.
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