May 14, 2013. Russian citizens are now paying their loans off less frequently than before. Banks’ customers have not made a single payment on nearly 600,000 loans, and the number of such loans rose by 15% in the first quarter of 2013, Rossiyskaya Gazeta refers to the National Credit History Bureau as saying.

The number of loans that banks haven’t received a single back-payment on started to rise as early as the second quarter of 2012, and the Bureau believes this number is prone to keep growing. The organizations feels this has to do with the fact that banks are now dealing with the more risk-prone market segments. The lending institutions representatives explain that, given that the consumer lending volumes soared by 40% last year, the number of NPLs couldn’t but go up.

However, experts don’t think interest rates on loans will go up for all the conscientious borrowers due to the growing competition on the retail market. Due to a large level of delinquency, however, banks will most likely have to look more carefully into a customer’s paying capacity, they say.