Classification of Professional Participants in the Financial Market of the Russian Federation: Institutional Aspect

Abstract

Today, various organizations operate in the Russian Federation, the main activity of which is to provide financial products and services to customers. The scientific community does not currently have a unified classification of professional participants in the financial market. The classification criteria that are used most often refer to certain types of financial organizations. This set the author a scientific task – to propose classification features of Russia’s financial market pro-fessional participants. Realizing that financial organizations can be classified according to various criteria, in this paper we focus only on the institutional aspect of classification (i.e., on the quantita-tive characteristics of financial organizations). To study the institutional aspects of professional par-ticipants in the Russian financial market, we consider it advisable to apply several classification criteria developed by the author. The classification based on the type of activity reveals the share of organizations in the financial market engaged in banking operations, while one based on the li-cense criteria allows drawing conclusions, including those concerning the financial sector reliability. The classification based on the financial market segments makes it possible to assess the develop-ment of the use of various financial instruments. The customer relations specifics have so far been extremely poorly studied in the scientific community, but this feature is important for the research both in scientific and practical aspects. The scale of activity criterion makes it possible to assess the share of participants in microfinance and their number and to compare these data with the indica-tors characterizing large and medium-sized participants.