New requirements for bank reserves have added work to collectors

Banks responded to the Bank of Russia’s tightening of control over risks by changing their mode of working with collectors. Now debts that are only 5-15 days overdue are transferred to debt collectors; previously, banks preferred to deal with such loans on their own.

Participants in the collection market told Kommersant that banks began to involve collectors in dealing with problem debts of individuals at the earliest stages. “If previously banks primarily involved us in dealing with debts that were overdue for more than 90 days, in rare cases 30 days, then in the second half of last year there was a tendency towards earlier transfer,” senior vice president of the National Collection Service told Kommersant. Sergey Shpeter. “About 20% of our partner banks began to involve us in dealing with debts overdue for 15 days or more, and some even for 5 days.” According to the general director of the collection agency Sequoia Credit Consolidation, Elena Dokuchaeva, there is indeed a tendency to transfer debts at an early stage. “We also see that banks began to transfer debts to us for work earlier,” she says. National Collection Service and Sequoia Credit Consolidation are some of the largest collection agencies, so their data is generally representative of the market.

According to market participants, the reasons that pushed bankers to involve collectors in collecting debts overdue up to 30 days were the more stringent requirements of the Central Bank for reserves for such loans. According to the amendments of the Bank of Russia to regulation 254-P, from March 1, banks will have to accrue reserves in the amount of 6% for portfolios of homogeneous loans (retail and loans to small and medium-sized businesses) with minimal overdue (up to 30 days) and not 3%, as now . The Central Bank announced new requirements at the beginning of autumn last year (see Kommersant, September 26, 2012), and banks began to prepare. Previously, banks themselves preferred to work with such debtors, but the doubling of reserve standards forces them to look for more effective and faster methods of collection, note collection market participants. “Banks are testing how effectively collectors can collect such debts than banks’ own services,” says Dmitry Zhdanukhin, general director of the Collection Development Center. “Depending on the results of the test, transferring debts at the earliest stages may become a common practice.”

Banking market participants do not deny that they are preparing to tighten reserve standards for early delinquency. “There are much more people who are overdue for up to 30 days than those who are overdue for up to 90 days, and often the young overdue is technical, so tightening the provisioning for such loans cannot but worry us,” says the deputy chairman of the board of HKF Bank Vladimir Gasyak.— Basically, at this stage, calling clients is used, we have a large contact center, and we do it ourselves, but for banks whose own collection service is not so developed, outsourcing young overdue debts to a collector can be very relevant in connection with the upcoming tightening of reservations." According to Grigory Vartsibasov, a member of the board of directors of Trust Bank, if the bank does not have its own collection service, it makes sense to involve collectors in dealing with early delinquencies. “After the lending boom (over the past year, the volume of loans to individuals grew by 39.3% - Kommersant ) one way or another, an increase in bad debts will follow, and outsourcing for such banks is a more convenient and simpler way of collection than creating their own service, “he notes. “We have our own service, but we still periodically transfer problematic debts with young overdue debts to collectors in order to compare the effectiveness of our employees and third-party agents.”

According to Elena Dokuchaeva, attracting collectors to work with early overdue debt is justified for banks from an economic point of view, because the amount of overdue debt at an early stage is usually small, and the interest charged by the collector for the work is significantly lower than when transferring debts to a later date. later stages. “If the market average when working with debts overdue from 90 days - if it is transferred to a collector for the first time - the amount of the agency fee is 16-20% of the amount of collected debts, then when transferring at an early stage, up to 30 days, it is 8-10 %,” says Sergei Shpeter.

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