Ukraine as a landfill of an electronic banking concentration camp
In March, 2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Ukraine concluded an agreement on the sixth program of assistance to Ukraine in the amount of 17,5 billion. The IMF transferred approximately half of the planned amount and is waiting for Kiev to fulfill its obligations. Among them is the obligation to create a single credit register of Ukraine.
Back in 2015, the Verkhovna Rada proposed to consider the draft law No. 3111, which gave the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) the right to create and maintain a single database of bank loans with complete data on the borrower. However, the process stalled, some projects were rejected, new ones were introduced. Only from September to November 2017 of the year four new registry creation projects were submitted to the Parliament, but none of them became law.
The idea of such a registry is an attempt to introduce a system of effective control over the population and business using credit histories. Bankers always make credit decisions taking into account credit stories potential customer. A credit history gives an idea of what loans an individual or legal entity took in the past and how it executed the relevant loan agreements.
At the end of the 19th century, the first credit history bureaus (CII) appeared, which were established by several banks and collected information about loans and the performance of credit agreements by customers. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, CII existed approximately in the 90 countries of the world. Some of them serve dozens and even hundreds of banks, cooperate with other financial organizations (insurance companies, leasing firms, microfinance organizations), with lessors, with trading firms. In some cases, BUCs sell information to employers who are considering the issue of hiring a person and want to have full information about the candidate. The LIC does not shy away from contacts with tax services, currency and financial control authorities, and sometimes with special services.
In the United States, the “Big Three” was clearly defined, which monopolized the market of CII services: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. These are the giants of American business, acting as transnational corporations.
Equifax was founded in 1899, the headquarters in Atlanta, GA. Assets - 6,7 billion, annual sales amount to 3,1 billion, operating profit - 0,8 billion (2016), the number of staff - more than 9 thousands of employees in 14 countries.
Experian is a young company founded in 1996. De jure, this is not even an American company, its legal residence is Dublin (Ireland). In fact, Experian is an American-British company. Assets - 7,4 billion, annual sales - 4,6 billion, operating profit - 1,2 billion (2016 year). The company employs about 17 thousands of people in 37 countries.
TransUnion was founded in 1968 Headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. Assets - 4,8 billion, sales - 1,7 billion, operating profit - 0,3 billion (2016 year). The number of employees is 4700. The company works primarily with consumer credit recipient histories.
Under the cap of the "big three" is the entire adult population of the United States, its tentacles stretch to many other countries. Equifax collects information on more than 800 millions of individuals and more than 88 millions of companies around the world. The Experian database contains information about 235 million individuals and 25 million companies and organizations. And if you believe the company TransUnion, in its database contains information about about a billion individuals living in more than 30 countries in the world.
The Ukrainian authorities have decided to keep up in terms of population control. Back in 2005, the law of Ukraine “On the organization of the formation and circulation of credit histories” was passed, which regulated the activity of the CII and put them under the control of the NBU. Today, the register of the National Bank of Ukraine has nine CIs. However, the quality of information provided by the Ukrainian CII leaves much to be desired. A lot of mistakes, distortions, frank fakes. And most importantly, in the conditions of the Ukrainian chaos, nine autonomous bureaus are overkill. It is difficult to make a puzzle if its separate fragments are scattered across nine offices. In the United States, 99 percent of the necessary information about individuals and legal entities can be found in the “Big Three”. The IMF does not object to Ukraine maintaining the visibility of the BKI market and leaving nine organizations, but insists that all information collected by the BKY should be concentrated in one place. In fact, this is a model of an electronic banking concentration camp.
Against this project - Ukrainian CII, which understand that in such a scheme they will not be needed and they will have to transfer the accumulated information to the NBU. Against a single credit register and the people who rightly fear that personal data will leave the National Bank to the side. And the project is supported by a part of commercial banks, which make it easier to receive information “from one window”, and, of course, the National Bank of Ukraine, which seeks to obtain the most powerful database in the country for individuals and legal entities, which the Security Service of Ukraine certainly does not have. And the “beneficiary of last resort” will be Washington. More precisely, a handful of the true owners of America.
Today there are not very many countries where all credit information would be consolidated in one database. In some European countries, central banks or other financial regulators accumulate credit histories only for large loans (for example, in the eurozone - more than 1 million euros), everything else is given away by the traditional credit bureaus. Almost all credit information is concentrated in one place in countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal, Georgia, Latvia. In May, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation announced 2017 that it intends to create a single database on loans and debts of citizens, access to which will be obtained by all banks. Approximately this model of the IMF and the European Commission impose Kiev. The current credit bureaus decided to “throw a bone”: they say, the NBU will accumulate information only on large loans and borrowers, the rest will still pass through the existing banking institutions. In this case, when establishing a watershed for a loan in 50 thousand hryvnia, information about only 5% of private borrowers will be transferred to the NBU credit register. In search of data on the solvency of the remaining 95% of individual customers, credit institutions will continue to contact the CII.
However, in the autumn of 2017, the creation of a single credit registry in Ukraine slowed down. It became obvious how high the risks of concentrating credit information in one database are. This showed an unprecedented case of information leaks from the Equifax database. In September, its management reported that the company's websites were subjected to cyber attacks and 143 personal data of millions of customers (names, addresses, insurance numbers, driver’s license numbers, etc.), as well as 209 credit card numbers of thousands of people were stolen by unidentified attackers. This somewhat cooled the fervor of supporters of the creation of unified credit registries.
The IMF uses Ukraine as a testing ground for developing new schemes for managing various areas of human activity. I already wrote that today in Ukraine, the use of blockchain technologies for creating e-government and conducting privatization deals is being worked out, a draft of introducing cryptographic grids, etc., is being prepared. These are all elements of the design of an electronic banking concentration camp. The same applies to the project of maximum centralization of credit information in the Central Bank.
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