UrBC, Moscow, January 11, 2019. Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service warns that antimonopoly investigations are under way to look into the bank’s faulty policies, namely, the cases when terms and conditions get worse for already existing deposit contracts, the FAS and Central Bank declare in their joint statement.

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service has been faced with quite a few cases when banks adopt unscrupulous practices to attract private customers’ funds onto their deposits. Some banks, for example, would offer higher interest rates on fixed-term deposits and would then take a number of measures to actually make the terms of these existing deposits worse.

Among such measures are a commission for adding more money into the deposit; a ban on adding money to a deposit that was not previously in place; and a decrease in the interest rate.

‘Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Bank of Russia would like to alert the banks to the fact that any faulty policies aimed at making the consumer properties of an existing banking product worse, regardless of the grounds for the change, might result in an antimonopoly investigation,’ the statement says.