Our main objective is to entrust several strategic credit bureaus with the imperative to aggregate information on aggregate debt payments. These offices will be subject to greater regulation, primarily concerning data protection. If the market cannot come to an agreement, we will have to take an alternative route and create a single integrator. Furthermore, we plan to eliminate certain issues with regulation. These include the collection of credit histories in cases of securitisation, license revocation or bank resolution. Furthermore, in recent years financial regulation has been advanced by adding further objectives that are completed using this regulation. Therefore, alongside the main objective of ensuring the stability of individual banks and financial institutions, ensuring financial stability now falls within the remit. In our opinion, there is currently room for one more addition. Let me explain. The aim of financial regulation has conventionally been seen solely as risk limitation. Attempts to put in place differentiated regulation that would curtail one area of business but stimulate other, higher-priority ones, have always been met with outcry. But proportional regulation, for example, which we started to develop, stimulates small business lending. This was one of the goals for its introduction. Another example: the discouragement of unsecured consumer lending forced banks to cultivate mortgage lending, among other things. For example, a large share of bank lending is currently used for mergers and acquisitions. This creates risks for banks, is unlikely to significantly benefit the country, does not create additional gross product or new jobs, and simply facilitates the redistribution of property.

We are working together with law enforcement agencies and are now focusing on public awareness. About a month ago, we launched a joint project with Yandex – the microfinance organisations on our register are marked with a special symbol in the search results so that it is easier to understand whether a given microfinance institution is legal or not. Moreover, this year saw Mir cards issued on a large scale. In Russia, they are accepted by all payment terminals and ATMs. The issue is proceeding at a good pace: over 10.6 million cards have already been issued. In the last month and a half alone, over 2 million cards were issued. Mir is a competitive system and offers all the services on the domestic market that the public are used to after using international payment systems. Our strategic objective in the coming years is ensuring Mir cards are accepted internationally, firstly within the Eurasian Economic Union. We are making progress in this area with our partners in the Eurasian Economic Union. Last week, the first cross-border transactions using Mir cards were carried out with Armenia’s ArCa payment system. This is the first project we have undertaken to organise equal intersystem interaction. (I believe the citizens of the two countries will benefit from new financial opportunities. I would like to express my gratitude to the Central Bank of Armenia and the management team of the ArCa payment system for their incredibly effective collaboration and promotion of this project).