Aurel Bernat, Executive Director, Financial Markets and Investor Relations, Banca Transilvania, took part in the first BT Invest event, held in Oradea in partnership with Ziarul Financiar. At the conference “How Romanian capital can grow together. From investors to companies. From capital to business”, Aurel Bernat spoke about the role of listings in enhancing corporate transparency and the importance of attracting capital to finance development plans.

• Across the Banca Transilvania Group, our asset management, pensions and brokerage subsidiaries currently manage approximately 12 billion euros in our clients’ accounts. This is, in fact, wealth that has accumulated over time among our clients and that they have entrusted to us or placed under our management.
  
  
• Romania is in the spotlight right now in a positive context, coming after two to three years of growth in the local capital markets. There is clear support from pension funds and investment funds, and local entrepreneurs can benefit from this.
  
  
• I don’t think a listing is necessarily about the numbers. First and foremost, going public brings greater transparency to a business.
  
  
• While an entrepreneur may usually be reluctant to talk about revenue or EBITDA, once the company is listed this information is available to any analyst who opens the company’s website or its current reports. Things become far more transparent.
  
  
• When a company lists, it can sell only a fraction of the business. You don’t have to sell half or the whole company; you can sell as little as 1% if you want to raise capital.
  
  
• It is time we talked more about the role of the capital market in financing companies. On the one hand, a company distributes dividends to shareholders; on the other hand, if it truly wants to grow, it also needs shareholders to bring in capital and invest in its development.
  
  
• To grow, you have to move off the business-as-usual trajectory onto a completely different path, and that takes money. It’s very hard to come to a bank and say “I want to grow tenfold”, because the bank looks at historical numbers. Yes, we can talk about project finance, but for the bank the numbers speak.