Aurel Bernat, Executive Director of Financial Institutions and Investor Relations at Banca Transilvania, participated in the conference “Financial and banking market”, organized by Bursa Newspaper. În cadrul evenimentului, a vorbit, pe lângă perspectivele sectorului bancar, și despre modul în care investitorii străini privesc România:

• I'm coming back after a three-week tour during which I talked with investors from Vienna, London, New York, because, as you know, last week we attracted one billion euros in Romania, through Transilvania Bank bonds. I tell you that wherever I went I did not feel inferior to any other player in the international capital market. As long as companies perform - and we have many companies that perform -, especially in certain key areas such as the banking sector, which is a proxy for the economy, and the energy sector, which is very well represented at the Bucharest Stock Exchange and where there is traction precisely due to the situation in the Middle East, the world looks at us favorably. We have 19 million inhabitants, domestic demand, 85% energy independence, the Neptun Deep project. In addition, the impact of the war in Iran is still limited for us.
  
  
• The world looks at us with very good eyes, but what foreign investors generally do not understand is why, we as a country, always see the problems, display them as major problems, know how to solve them, but never take action. It is as if we were looking at a forest and do not see it because of some trees.
  
  
• Foreign and local investors only ask for peace. If there is peace and predictability, things can be done. With these things, Romania's story is very easy to sell. We are the second largest economy after Poland in Eastern Europe, we had an average economic growth of 3.5% for ten years, and now, in the last two and a half years, we have a growth of only 0.6-0.7%, but this is explainable.
  
  
• The major issue I would raise concerns taxation. If we always chase after "national champions" in all fields and overtax them – whether we call it a banking tax or something else – we ultimately weaken an industry whose main purpose should be financial intermediation and financing the economy.
  
  
• Private credit relative to GDP stands at approximately 25% in Romania – the lowest level in the European Union. Total assets relative to GDP are around 50%, while the EU average is 200%, and private credit to GDP is approximately 100%.
  
  
• We can rely on the fact that the banking sector can double its assets in the next 5–10 years without major surprises. It is a natural development to close the gap with the European Union. Considering that the GDP per capita is already at 79–80% of the European convergence level, the next sector that will be able to recover the gap is the banking sector, namely financial intermediation.
  
  

The conference can be watched in full here.