Investment platforms in Russia: concept, current state and prospects

The current state of investment platform services in Russia and the prospects for their development are discussed in the article. An analysis of existing interpretations of the term “crowdfunding” was conducted in order to delimit the scope of the study. The analysis was carried out in terms of established practice in the Russian Federation and the understanding of this term by the regulator of the Russian financial market. It was found that crowdfunding is used by market participants in a broad sense. The Bank of Russia uses crowdfunding in a narrow sense, when gratuitous financing of projects is excluded. Moreover, in practice, there are two types of crowdfunding platforms: those that operate by investment platform operators (OIPs), falling under the regulation of the Bank of Russia, and those that are not operate by OIPs. The reason is that regulation appeared in the Russian Federation later than crowdfunding itself. Only OIPs and their platforms were analyzed in this study. The study concluded that the branch of the financial market under consideration is developing dynamically, showing growth every year. The volume of funds attracted through OIPs, the number of OIPs themselves, and participants in investment platforms: investors and individuals attracting investments are growing. At the same time, the high key rate of the Bank of Russia negative impact was revealed, its size led to a decrease in the share of active participants. In terms of types of crowdfunding, the most popular is crowdlending, and the most common borrowers are SMEs.