The Central Bank will create a “gray” register of problem clients

The "black lists" of problem customers of banks, which the Central Bank now sends out manually, can replace a single register of problem customers, to which all banks will have access. It will include clients with non-performing debts, tax debts, problem collaterals, and bank “refuseniks” according to anti-money laundering criteria. The Central Bank promises that it will also provide for a rehabilitation mechanism, but how it will work in practice is still unclear. Difficulties will begin first for legal entities, and then for individuals with a spoiled history: they will no longer have a chance to get lost, writes . Kommersant

The Central Bank has identified a plan to create a new register as a separate area, this year the entire regulatory framework will be created for the project and put into pilot operation, the launch is scheduled for 2020, said Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Vasily Pozdyshev.

This is the first project of the Central Bank in which it will directly provide services to the banking industry, he says. Changes to the legislation will be needed, but the regulator will do this in order to reduce risks in the banking system as a whole.
Banks still receive information from the Central Bank about problem customers, but only in the form of manual distribution of lists in which it is easy for a problem client to get lost. “If you can easily and quickly break through a client in a common base, then you will know that your client already has debts in another bank,” says Pozdyshev.
Banks like the idea, but they are afraid of problems with data quality, exclusion from the register of rehabilitated clients and its legal status. If the decision on the base participant is up to the bank, it is possible that some banks will behave too softly, while others will refuse all such clients, Kommersant writes.
"Black lists" - the very ones that the Central Bank sends out manually, have already become a big headache for business. Entrepreneurs massively complain about blocking based on unverified information, while getting out of the blacklist - even after the rehabilitation procedure was launched - was extremely problematic. At the end of January, Elvira Nabiullina promised that the Central Bank would revise the black list of clients who were denied service by banks on the basis of the anti-money laundering law (115-FZ). The goal is to eliminate "excessive pressure on honest business." It was planned to leave only those who performed the “riskiest operations” on the black list, but there is no specifics yet.

Business knows perfectly well what anti-money laundering control is and what it means to be blacklisted by the Central Bank. Theoretically, the bank can accept such a client, but in practice it is a sentence. The new register, no matter how good it may serve, cannot but cause concern.