Volume of complaints against Russian Forex dealers declines in Q1 2020
The Central Bank of Russia registered a total of 293 complaints against participants in the securities market in the first quarter of 2020.
There were fewer complaints regarding Russian FX dealers in the first quarter of 2020, according to a report published by the Central Bank of Russia today.
During the first quarter of 2020, the Central Bank registered 293 complaints targeting participants in the securities market. This is down 4% from levels seen a year earlier.
The proportion of complaints against brokers rose (from 46% to 65% of the total), whereas the percentage fell for FX dealers (from 9% to 0.3%). Let’s note that, in 2019, among all of the complaints against professional market participants, the ones targeting FX dealers accounted for 4%. This compares with a proportion of 2.1% a year earlier.
It is worth noting that there are only four licensed Forex dealers, or OTC FX brokers, in Russia. Among them is PSB-Forex, which was put up for sale but the auction failed due to lack of bids. The small number of FX dealers partially explains the small number of complaints against them.
However, this does not mean that the Russian FX market lacks unauthorized firms targeting Russian investors. In October 2019, Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service published a warning about a number of foreign entities that illegally offer online trading services to Russian investors.
Back to today’s stats, let’s note that there was a rise in the proportion of complaints concerning outages of the trading systems of brokers. There was also a rise in the number of complaints about forced closing of clients’ positions. The Central Bank concludes that the trading systems of the brokers were not prepared for the rise in client activity during periods of heightened volatility.
