If the banking community itself turns out to be unable to resist the temptation of descending into practices that are abusive for consumers, we will be responding adequately. As I have already said, the first issue of our concern is misselling and hard selling. We believed the banking community to be interested in retaining people in the financial market and keeping their funds inside the financial system. We were hoping that banks would be able to agree upon selling rules and would not offer such a product to a client that would be disappointing, striving to sign one contract, would not be misleading about product prices or conceal additional services. The associations of financial market participants jointly developed selling standards two years ago already. Eventually, as little as 20 banks have joined these standards, and even these banks fail to comply with them. As you remember, we have held several discussions on this topic, emphasising that if the banking community does not comply with the standards itself, we will have to request legislative authorities to adopt adequate regulation. Disappointingly, that negative episode we have also discussed when investment life insurance policies were being sold through banks was followed by the sales of complex structured products. This implies that even such a dramatic episode as investment life insurance has had no influence on abusive practices in banks’ sales under agency agreements. Therefore, we were forced to request legislative authorities to grant us the powers to stipulate selling rules through our regulation.
This topic is studied not by a few banks or countries — this is a global trend. Approximately 50 regulators worldwide are dealing with this topic. Some countries have already launched their pilot projects. We believe that we will be inevitably moving in this direction. Over the period of the discussion of our consultation paper, we have received very detailed feedback from the banking community, and not only in writing — we are discussing various aspects of this topic at multiple sites, including the Association, the State Duma, and the Federation Council. We will continue to study this topic further since it definitely requires diving into the particulars and extensive detailed discussions. Our preliminary findings 6/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  as are follows: the majority of banks support a two-tiered retail digital ruble model where banks service clients opening wallets on the central bank’s platform and processing transactions. We will sum up the complete results of the public consultations in the near future. Then, we will elaborate a detailed concept of a digital ruble and will be discussing it with general public, market participants, and banks at the beginning of summer. The next stage is the creation of a prototype platform, testing, limited-scale experiments, and, of course, changes to be introduced into laws. The second priority, which, just as digital currencies, has become a global trend as well, is ESG. The world is paying increasingly more attention to climate and generally environmental risks.