2015, we laid foundations for the development of a national rating industry, and the new legislation allows us to expect that a really respectable and professional rating industry will be built in our country. now about the national payment system. in 2015, operations and clearing centre of the npcs was launched. it processes all operations made in russia through cards of international payment systems. the transfer of payments into russia was implemented in a very short period due to external risks but its implementation was of high technological quality in line with international standards. in the end of the last year a pilot issue of national payment system cards mir was implemented. the cards are already issued by banks of the crimea ( and accepted throughout the crimea ) and some other banks. the mass issue of the cards is to start in the second half of the year. besides, we have improved the system of bank of russia financial messaging system, a swift counterpart. it complies with all swift formats and everyone can use this convenient format to transfer messages domestically. we closely cooperate with our colleagues in belarus and kazakhstan in coordinating the development of the national payment systems. some words about countering fictitious transactions. according to our estimates, fictitious transactions have shrunk by about one - third. the monitoring has become more efficient. fictitious transactions in the non - bank sector are better revealed due to, among other things, our thorough inspections we can implement as a megaregulator. in 2015, quite a few unscrupulous players were swept off the market : 93 banks, 96 insurance companies, 21 non - governmental pension funds, 1, 703 microfinance organisations, and 609 professional securities market participants. one of the reasons behind it was servicing the shadow sector of the economy. looking back at the year, i would like to say that it was undoubtedly challenging with external environment constantly changing for the worse, but for all that we have achieved some important results. first, the economy showed its adaptability, and not a passive one. we can see that new sectors, the whole sectors have managed to grow amid an extremely worsened environment. there were also enterprises in the generally failing sectors which took the new possibilities and show potential for development. second, the last year clearly signalled that bis central bankers ’ speeches structural reforms are needed for the economy to return to sustainable growth ; and removing internal restrictions is a short - term objective. i am convinced that we will manage it. thank you for your attention. thank you. bis central bankers ’ speeches

to 10. 5 %. our monetary policy is guided by strategic priorities, consistency and adherence to market methods. we relied on conservative forecasts in our decision - making ; unfortunately, it was a reasonable thing to do during the whole of 2015. as a result, we have managed to preserve confidence in the financial system, and the alarming assumptions that capital flow can be restricted or the printing press can be launched are no longer taken seriously. the third one is special measures of temporary or limited nature. we applied them because the external conditions throughout 2015 were persistently challenging, even extraordinary, and really required the bank of russia to take special substandard measures. the bank of russia used special - purpose refinancing instruments which somewhat backed up the real sector in the fields where the market failed : project financing, non - commodity exports, and small business. bis central bankers ’ speeches now, the upcoming transition to structural liquidity surplus is putting the expansion of specialpurpose instruments on hold. the efficiency of these instruments varies, that is why we will focus on fine - tuning them. thereby, we have revised the criteria for driving non - commodity exports in order to focus on technological and manufacturing projects. as for project financing, we will refinance liabilities only for the projects already selected by the interdepartmental commission. the use of allocated limits only slightly exceeds 70 % or 97 billion rubles. to solve the issue of external debt repayments, fx refinancing instruments were used. as a result, the external debt shrank by $ 84 billion, i. e. by 16 %, in 2015. the total debt reduction for the two years was 30 %. it means that the debt burden for our economy has decreased considerably. banks ’ demand for foreign currency, provided by the bank of russia, was sinking noticeably over the past year and we are gradually abandoning these instruments. we expect banks to redeem the fx debt by the end of next year. we offered banks temporary regulatory easing to support the financial system. it reached the target and was curtailed by the end of last year. thereby, we backed up the capability of the banking system to lend to the economy, but avoided risk accumulation triggered by excessive regulatory easing. we have managed to preserve households ’ confidence in financial institutions : instead of a bank run we saw ruble deposits growing by 25 %. what are our current objectives? it is the interest rate policy that will allow us to achieve the 4 %