Tiberiu Moisă, Deputy CEO, MidCorporate & SMEs at Banca Transilvania, took part in the KRUK Summit of Now Conference, organized by KRUK in partnership with Ziarul Financiar, on November 24–25, where he made the following statements:

• Looking ahead, the only relevant fear is fear of the unknown. I feel uncertainty in the pit of my stomach more than anything, at least when it comes to the economy and entrepreneurship. People can get used to many things and adapt, but it’s much harder to do that when you don’t know what’s coming. The fact that we don’t know what lies ahead is what generates a kind of economy‑wide stress. It doesn’t yet show up in the numbers, in loan quality. You can sense it in the air, at an individual level. It’s a stress with a very clear cause, but it is also amplified when we all talk about it.
  
  
• We sometimes refer to these segments—from small companies to mid-sized ones, the so‑called mid‑cap corporates—as entrepreneurial segments because decisions there are heavily influenced by owners’ sentiment. In that space, the same adaptation mechanisms as in households appear immediately: lower consumption leads to lower sales, and companies then try to rationalize. They don’t just optimize costs depending on how prepared they are; they can also make investments that will optimize costs over time. When you invest in digitalization and technology, in my view, this adaptive behavior in the period ahead—as long as the outlook is for modest growth, but not a recession—will do its job.
  
  
• The question that matters is what we need to do—how we can encourage behavior that will catalyze our growth engines—because Romania is not an island apart from the rest of the world where we have time for our own challenge and the rest of the world waits for us.
  
  
• As we adapt, it’s important to keep an eye on the future. Romania has potential growth engines with a high degree of certainty. Significant funds will be pumped into critical areas, such as infrastructure. I am convinced that in a mild environment, seeing tangible successes—openings, new investments, positive economic news—can stimulate behavior, especially in the entrepreneurial space, which depends on confidence and comfort.
  
  
• When you see an entrepreneur who prefers not to reinvest the profit earned, but to bring the money back as a shareholder loan, you wonder why this is happening on a broad scale.
  
  
• The more you stress the economy—if inflation rises further, if interest rates rise further—the more resilience is narrowed. Even so, I believe we are in a good place. We see resilience that is well balanced.
  
  
• I see a very good period for bold decisions, provided that the courage also makes economic sense.
  
  
• These loans, launched during the pandemic and run over five consecutive years, were used to the limit. They were overused at that time, which also pushed loan volumes up artificially. What we see in terms of deterioration in quality, I would say, is only marginal. The higher ratio also reflects a shrinking base. They are being repaid at a faster pace. When there are no more subsidies, grants or incentives to receive, you no longer have a reason to keep these loans. So, at least this year, we have also seen a widespread wave of early repayments.
  
  
• Additional stress was created when the state decided to continue financing certain projects from public sources only subject to specific criteria they set. Naturally, this induced stress across the entire construction sector.