Analysis of the market development of microfinance institutions in the Russian Federation

Over the past 15 years, the Russian economy has faced crisis phenomena - the Global Economic Crisis of 2008, the currency and financial crisis of 2014, and the pandemic crisis of 2020. Each of them has caused damage both at the national level in general and to every Russian citizen in particular. Each successive crisis leads to higher inflation, which in turn, according to the Phillips curve, increases unemployment. All this leads to a decline in income and an increase in poverty in the country. One way of solving this problem was suggested by a Bangladeshi economics professor, Muhammad Yunus, who in 1983 actually started microfinance by creating the «Grameen Bank», which issued micro-loans for short periods of time. This greatly improved the lot of the poor people of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The success of this model inspired financiers from many other countries, including Russia. Microcredit has quickly become a popular tool for economic development. The purpose of this research is to assess the current development of microfinance institutions. For this purpose, we used both statistical data of the Bank of Russia for the last 2-3 years on a quarterly basis and academic publications in this area of the financial market. The paper looks at: the dynamics of the microloan structure, the dynamics of the number of microfinance institutions, the structure of overdue and ceded loans in the total volume of the microloan portfolio, the dynamics of the share of online microloans in the relevant segment, the dynamics of the borrowed funds by type of person. The research discovered an expansion of the microfinance market in Russia and an increase in the share of online microloans in it, which indicates the increasing digitalization of this segment of the Russian credit system.