La ZF Bankers Summit 2026, organized by Financial Newspaper in 2-4 June, Banca Transilvania was represented on the second day by Anca Crăciun, Director Coordinator Private, Premium Banking and Retail Products, Tiberiu Moisă, Deputy General Director MidCorporate and SME and of Bogdan Pleșuvescu, Deputy General Director.

Statements from the first day of the event can be found here.

Anca Crăciun, Coordinating Director Private, Premium Banking and Retail Products:

• The private banking market is experiencing rapid growth. We have over 6,000 clients, over 4 billion euros in assets under management, and the ticket size is 200,000 euros for private banking. This money comes from the growth of private wealth. According to The Wealth Report 2026 study, conducted by Knight Frank, in the last 5 years there has been a 93% increase in Romania in ultra high net worth clients, with wealth over 30 million dollars, which is a good sign for the market. I know this is the top of the pyramid, but that means the market is growing.
  
  
• We cannot give an exact figure for the potential in Romania, but if we think a little about the figures circulated so far, I think we can talk about 50,000 potential customers in the Romanian market.
  
  
• Trust is one of the fundamental values on which we rely in the relationship with a client from the private banking segment, then we talk about yield. It is about understanding the client's needs, a diversification of products. Here we cannot talk about a yield for a specific product, but for an entire range of products.
  
  
• The fact that we have a consolidated group behind us gives us the ease of putting all solutions on the table, from savings products to ETFs, access to over 30 external stock markets, etc. We offer portfolio diversification in such a way that the yield is balanced, from conservative products to the most complex ones, with higher risk.
  
  
• The relationship with a client is viewed in the long term, over a period longer than one year. It depends very much on the portfolio structure, the client profile, the liquidity horizon.
  
  
• In the case of BT, more than 60% of private banking clients have their portfolio in investment products, which means a lot. It means that financial education has increased considerably recently.
  
  
• Size of the ticketvaries. I think account size doesn't matter. If I look at the BT client, at their profile, who is the successful entrepreneur between 45 and 60 years old, who either collects dividends, has sold their business, or just a part of their stake in a business, we see that they have a different level of financial education now compared to a few years ago and understand products differently.
  
  
• We are in the most beautiful phase of the development of the private banking market in Romania: passing the baton to the new generation, passing on the legacy. I believe that money is meant to circulate and the money in private banking accounts in turn produces other money.
  
  
• We look at the client as an ecosystem, we practically take into account both the company's needs and build the perfect solutions for the respective development moment. So, I don't think I can say that the money in private banking accounts is necessarily meant to be inherited, but a mix between inheritance and creating new value might be exactly the picture that characterizes the market's development level at the present moment.
  
  

Tiberiu Moisă, Deputy General Director MidCorporate and SME:

• SMEs in Romania continue to finance themselves, but the credit structure is beginning to change: small and medium-sized companies are increasingly turning to working capital loans and less to investment financing, amid economic uncertainties, fiscal consolidation, and geopolitical pressures.
  
  
• As you go towards smaller companies and look more closely at SME-type businesses, the mood of entrepreneurs and founders has a much greater influence. We have conducted various research on this subject to better understand behaviors and the way decisions are made, and we have observed this every time. This mood weighs heavily on investment decisions, much more than in the case of large companies, which naturally work with a somewhat longer perspective, at least medium-term, and where budgets or decisions are not as heavily influenced by what happens day to day.
  
  
• The mood today, although everyone talks positively about the potential we have, is still heavy when we discuss privately with entrepreneurs. It is an almost unique combination: our own national problems - fiscal consolidation, adjustments across the board, which implicitly leads to adjustments in the consumption area, plus international problems and anxiety generated by the geopolitical context. Emotionally speaking, it is a rather hard period to endure for many.
  
  
• Just as a family adjusts its expenses - or we expect it to adjust its expenses according to income situation - know that a CFO at a very large company does the same. After they have just decided to continue their investment plans, he, when he goes home, like a family, is much more careful and adjusts his consumption. This is also how a small company acts. If it feels that this is a time to be more cautious, to stand more on its own feet, because it cannot afford to take certain risky decisions, it looks at the resources it has available, checks its capacities, and thinks that this is a period to stay calm. This is a form of economic intelligence. It is important to understand that this adaptation is different and that it can be an expression of economic intelligence, each at his own level.
  
  
• Everything that is happening today as a trend, catalyzed by technology, complicates the interactions we have with each other. In what sense? Previously, as an SME, when you took a loan from the bank, you had the possibility to talk to an analyst, someone who took care of you, and from there you received your first advice on financial education or, more precisely, on business education. More specifically, the first advice about what not to do with money, not necessarily about what to do with money, because at the bank you find out what not to do, not necessarily what to do.
  
  
• Today, these interactions are becoming more efficient, also democratized, so access is much broader for almost any category of company, regardless of size. I do not believe we have a problem with tools, but these valuable interactions for people disappear, because they are replaced by digital applications, everything goes much faster.
  
  
• Even though there are very many banks that talk about financial education and even make absolutely commendable efforts in this regard, in reality financial education is something that happens today on one's own.
  
  

Bogdan Pleșuvescu, Deputy General Director:

• If we had not had the fourth quarter of last year, it would have been quite good from the point of view of NPLs. In Q1, a certain inertia was felt from what happened in Q4, and in certain segments, especially in commerce, agriculture, a few companies appeared that fell into economic difficulty or default, which required interventions through some active structures. In a way, we were reminded of the 2009–2012 period, because there were weeks when the level of newly entered companies, either in insolvency portfolios or restructuring ones, reached similar levels.
  
  
• Let us not forget, however, that the courts were on strike for a good period of time during last summer. Therefore, a large number of cases have accumulated - at least in the area of preventive concordat or insolvency - and when the courts resumed activity, this number of insolvencies increased.
  
  
• If we look from the perspective of volumes in the restructuring market, May 2026 versus May 2025, we observe an increase in the volume of portfolio restructuring of approximately 27%, which I would not consider a worrying figure. Considering the economic context and the developments from last year, this dynamic was, to a large extent, expected.
  
  
• In the collection area, there is an observed trend of operational efficiency, a lot is invested in technology and AI. We are no longer just talking about automation robots, but about implementing artificial intelligence processes that anticipate customer behavior and avoid reaching the point where we make reactive calls; instead, we make more preventive calls in the debt collection area.
  
  
• In the early collection area we use AI, because there are certain customers who naturally have a behavior where they have a few days of delay. And then, based on the analyses we do, it does not make sense to bother those customers with calls or messages. And then, based on the algorithms, we only call where the probability of entering in default is bigger.