Cristina Șindile, CEO of BT Mic, recently gave an interview to Ziarul Financiar. What BT Mic, the microfinance company of the Banca Transilvania Financial Group, looks like after five years of operations, the pulse of the entrepreneurial business environment, and how BT Mic supports its clients were just some of the topics discussed.

We are seeing a great deal of initiative, adaptability and resilience among entrepreneurs. While small businesses are inherently more fragile because of their size, the way entrepreneurs have reacted at every stage over the past few years has shown that it can be done. We’ve also seen a strong sense of responsibility and ownership in the market. We have a little over five years of operations and, during this time, we’ve financed more than 21,000 entrepreneurs with upwards of 1.6 billion lei. Activity has grown year after year despite macroeconomic headwinds. This year we expect to finance around 6,500 clients, and 75% of them will be working with us for the first time.

BT Mic lends nationwide and its portfolio spans over 400 types of economic activity. The average loan size is around 60,000 lei, with a maximum of 200,000 lei. More than 22% of BT Mic’s activity goes to start-ups and firms with up to 12 months of operations at the time of financing.

Our financing covers both day‑to‑day working capital needs and various investments, which are funded in full, require no client contribution and come with generous maturities of up to seven years.

When a business comes to BT Mic, explains Cristina Șindile, everything starts with the entrepreneur’s story — what they are doing now and, above all, what they plan to do. From there, we agree on the right financing solution.

It’s only a short step from the story to financing the idea, and the whole process takes about five days.

Entrepreneurs can apply in the traditional way, in any BT Mic or BT unit, or online on the BT Mic website, via the Raul chatbot.

A small business, says Cristina Șindile, is essentially a successful mix of passion, a lot of hard work and the founder’s personal commitment, often alongside their family. Such a business supports its own development and, very often, the family’s cash flow as well.

The challenges facing small-business owners are those affecting entrepreneurship in general at this time, she adds: the rapid increase in inflation, and therefore in prices, has been felt just as much in these businesses’ cash flows.

As a result, the BT Mic CEO says, liquidity management has required closer attention throughout the year.

She also notes that many businesses have faced supply issues due to delayed deliveries, which translates into an additional cost — often higher than the cost generated directly by a price increase.

We carry a significant load of stress from the pandemic period. We barely had time to catch our breath before entering another fairly complicated chapter. That’s probably the biggest challenge, in fact — constantly finding, as an entrepreneur, the inner resources to keep going, Cristina Șindile pointed out.

Next year, she expects an inflection point in consumer behaviour, namely a decline in spending against the backdrop of this year’s rapid price increases.

In this context, she believes small entrepreneurs should focus their attention and effort on staying relevant in the market. Moreover, revisiting the business model — product, market, price — is what will help them navigate longer periods of economic stress, in her view.

For clients facing financial difficulties, she says, BT Mic first seeks to understand where the issues come from and what solutions exist.

Sometimes, says Cristina Șindile, there are short‑term, specific liquidity problems that can be resolved relatively quickly; other times, there are more complex, business‑level issues that affect performance.

Where there’s an action plan, motivation and the entrepreneur’s involvement, even if the current business is under strain, we come with solutions to restructure the loan repayment plan.

The BT Mic CEO says every year has been good in its own way. From 2020 until now, the economic context has been relatively different from one year to the next. The year 2020 was unusual because of the pandemic, as some entrepreneurs had to suspend their activity overnight starting in March.

The second half of the year was one of “small steps on ice,” she adds, followed by a return to normal business activity in 2021.

Online is probably the most obvious effect of the pandemic on entrepreneurial behaviour, she believes, as it was a sales channel that more and more businesses tried during that period.

The trend is driven mainly by the behaviour of new generations of consumers, who spend more and more time online — so that’s where they shop, she notes. “There are businesses that are born directly online, and more and more experienced businesses are testing online for the first time.”

Beyond financing, BT Mic consistently runs a series of initiatives to support small businesses.

Among them, Cristina Șindile mentions the “Buy from a small business” campaign, organised in autumn 2020, and STUP, the most recent initiative — a one‑stop shop for early‑stage entrepreneurs in Bucharest, where they can access a range of business solutions needed for their activity.

BT Mic will therefore remain a financier of small businesses in the period ahead. The need for financing is there, the BT Mic CEO says, and will continue, all the more so as the entrepreneurial environment — and not only that — is going through an inflationary period.

We don’t have different plans for the future. We want to continue as we are, by developing our lending activity and, equally, other initiatives that support entrepreneurship. Small businesses need this — and we absolutely love it. That’s what BT Mic is about, concluded Cristina Șindile.

Over 740,000 microenterprises filed their financial statements for last year with the Ministry of Finance. Their total turnover exceeded 252 billion lei in 2021, about 32 billion lei more than in the previous year, according to public data. Microenterprises generated total net profit of over 65 billion lei last year, 12 billion lei more than in 2020, and the average number of employees working in these microenterprises exceeded 900,000.

How will the new partnership with the European Investment Fund show up in BT Mic’s business and what types of companies can apply to benefit from guaranteed loans under this agreement?

We’ve been working with the European Investment Fund for several years. This year we’ve just concluded another guarantee agreement, through which more than 8,000 entrepreneurs accessed financing from us with the benefit of this guarantee. We’re now entering a new agreement that will open access to financing for a similar number of clients, with an estimated financing volume of 500 million lei. Together with the European Investment Fund, we are also running another guarantee programme dedicated exclusively to financing entities in education — private schools and kindergartens. To date, we’ve reached more than 200 schools and kindergartens with this product.

In its five years of activity, BT Mic has financed over 21,000 entrepreneurs with more than 1.6 billion lei, and this year, says BT Mic CEO Cristina Șindile, the expectation is that the number of clients receiving financing will reach 6,500.