Bogdan Pleșuvescu, Deputy CEO at Banca Transilvania, attended the KRUK Summit of Now conference, organised by KRUK in partnership with Ziarul Financiar, on November 24-25, where he made the following remarks:

• Through my day-to-day work I see clients who are encountering difficulties. I take a more measured view, not quite so rosy. What we are assessing right now is repayment capacity — not in the classic sense, but rather companies’ ability to cope with changing economic conditions. In fact, we are assessing resilience. If after the 2007-2009 crisis companies proved resilient and learned a lot, today I think the string has been stretched too far and too much is being asked of Romanian companies — more than they can deliver. I’m referring to the pressure coming from taxation.
  
  
• Everything is model-driven, and on that basis we assess a company’s creditworthiness and its ability to be financed or obtain funding. One thing is clear: banks have ample liquidity to deploy. We want to find as many companies as possible that can meet a bank’s requirements in order to receive those loans. Unfortunately, given the way companies are capitalised, this leads to fewer and fewer companies being bankable.
  
  
• We are in a situation where, after this change in RCA insurance legislation, maintenance and insurance costs for existing fleets have risen sharply. Investments made right after the pandemic are now reaching the point where vehicle fleets have to be renewed, and the costs are quite high. We are therefore looking more closely at the transport sector. I would also point to small retailers, because competition is very intense. The announcement that Carrefour is exiting the market is quite worrying. We may be at an  inflection point where the concept of small retailers — greengrocers, shops where you can find what you need — comes back into fashion, but right now the pressure on small retailers’ margins is very high.
  
  
• We are trying to understand the impact of these measures to downsize the public sector workforce on our portfolios. When you say a number of jobs will be affected, but we do not know exactly whether employees or only positions will be cut, that is a category we need to proactively approach in the period ahead.
  
  
• We cannot talk about a trend at this point. Personally, I have not seen such a dramatic drop in incomes among IT professionals. There are alternatives at the moment.
  
  
• For 2026, from our perspective, we are in the middle of the budgeting exercise. As regards cost of risk, we are allocating a somewhat higher budget than in 2025 on the risk assessment side. From a country perspective, what I would like for 2026 is for us to talk about natality as well. I would like a programme to support higher birth rates, because the labour shortage cannot be solved by immigration alone.