UrBC, Yekaterinburg, August 1, 2019. The number of micro-loans issued to Sverdlovsk Region-based applicants rose by 2.5% in the second quarter of 2019 compared with one year earlier and thus reached 144,583, the National Credit History Bureau’s research findings indicate.

In Russia on the whole, the number of loans issued by micro-financing organizations came to 4.54m in the second quarter of the year (down 1.2% on one year earlier).

‘The drop in the pay-day loans (the most popular micro-lending market segment) has to do with the micro-financing activity’s decreasing profitability. Quite a few micro-financing organizations are now less willing to offer small loans to new applicants; instead, they prefer to offer loans to existing customers, who can be trusted to pay back loans of more than RUB 10,000. The primary reason why micro-lending is no longer so profitable is that the Bank of Russia has been taking steps to "cool" the market down, including through setting limits on the cost of a micro-loan to applicants,’ says the Bureau’s Marketing Director Alexei Volkov.