Aurel Bernat, Executive Director, Financial Institutions and Investor Relations at Banca Transilvania, took part in the “Financial-Banking Market” conference, organized by Ziarul Bursa. At the event, alongside the outlook for the banking sector, he also spoke about how foreign investors see Romania:

• I’ve just come back from a three-week roadshow meeting investors in Vienna, London and New York because, as you know, last week we raised EUR 1 billion in Romania through the Banca Transilvania bonds. I can tell you that wherever we went, I never felt inferior to any other player in the international capital markets. As long as companies perform — and many do — especially in key areas like banking, which is a proxy for the economy, and energy, which is well represented on the Bucharest Stock Exchange and has traction precisely because of the situation in the Middle East, people look at us favorably. We have 19 million people, domestic demand, 85% energy independence, the Neptun Deep project. Moreover, the impact of the war in Iran is still limited for us.
  
  
• People look at us very favorably, but what foreign investors generally don’t understand is why, as a country, we always see the problems, present them as major, know how to solve them, yet never act. It’s as if we’re looking at a forest and can’t see it for the trees.
  
  
• Foreign and local investors ask for nothing but stability. If there is stability and predictability, things can be done. With that, Romania’s story is an easy sell. We are the second-largest economy in Eastern Europe after Poland, we had average economic growth of 3.5% for ten years, and now, in the past two and a half years, growth is only 0.6–0.7%, but that is explainable.
  
  
• The major issue I would raise is taxation. If we keep chasing “national champions” in every sector and overtax — whether we call it a bank tax or something else — we ultimately weaken an industry whose core purpose should be financial intermediation and financing the economy.
  
  
• Private-sector credit to GDP stands at around 25% in Romania — the lowest level in the European Union. Total assets to GDP are about 50%, while the EU average is 200%, and private-sector credit to GDP is around 100%.
  
  
• We can count on the banking sector being able to double its assets over the next 5–10 years with no major surprises. That would be a natural way to close the gap with the European Union. Given that GDP per capita is already at 79–80% of the European convergence level, the next sector that can catch up is banking — namely, financial intermediation.
  
  

The full conference can be watched here.