UrBC, Yekaterinburg, June 19, 2015. The amount of overdue loan payments owed by Ural Federal District residents came to 82.489bn RUR on June 1, 2015, which was 46.8% more than a year earlier. In Sverdlovsk Region, the figure went up by 40.4% on a year earlier and came to 27.564m RUR, the National Enforcement Service reports.

Ural Federal District-wide retail loan book reached 1.229 trillion RUR on June 1, 2015 (-0.1% on last year and -5.4% compared with the start of 2015, when the figure was 1.299 trillion RUR). The consolidated retail loan book of Sverdlovsk Region-based banks stood at 368.164bn RUR (-1% on a year earlier).

'A shrinking loan book is a national trend: at the time of a crisis, banks are forced to raise their interest rates, whereas the customer demand for loans has gone down,' the Service says.

According to Managing Director Anton Dianov, while the loan book is getting smaller, the overdue debt is growing bigger: the overall figure came to 82.489bn RUR, which is 26.279bn RUR, or 46.8% more than a year earlier and 15.412bn RUR, or 23% more than at the start of the year. The amount of overdue loan payments is increasing faster in the Urals than in the country on the whole (the overall overdue debt figures went up by 44.4%), even though the difference isn't a significant one.