ABN Amro to stay in Romania

ABN Amro bank will announce by the end of this year the list including the countries it will withdraw from and how it will adjust its international network, but the first signs show that Romania will not be part of the respective list.

“Romania has constituted an important support for commercial bank activities, particularly for customers such as large or international companies,” Rijkman Groenink, the bank’s chairman, stated on Thursday during a press conference, when he presented the group’s first-half financial results. The bank entered the Romanian market in 1995.

Restructuring will be based upon splitting activities into three customer categories, instead of the distribution on countries and regions, namely wholesale clients including investment and international bank divisions, private clients and Asset Management and a third category, consumer and commercial clients, which will reunite retail activities and SMEs.

The bank’s strategy objectives by year 2004 refer to the restructuring of the entire network function of the three large customer categories, as well as to the evolution of financial indicators and to a greater transparency of the bank’s results in relation to its stakeholders.

Groenink admitted that, through this aggressive development strategy, the bank would in the first place try to keep its independence. He showed that any fusion attempt would be regarded “very, very critically”, but that this perspective would not be ruled out “should there be no other alternative”. ABN Amro wishes to maintain its image of an “international bank with Dutch roots,” Groenink underscored.

He said that he could not estimate the number of persons to be displaced until the fate of each subsidiary is to be decided. He added however that, in case the bank leaves a country or another, the respective subsidiary would be, almost certainly, sold to another banking group.

“The decision to incorporate ABN’s operations in Hungary into the Swiss bank KBC should be regarded as an independent phenomenon,” Groenink specified, declining to offer for the time being any details linked to the future of ABN’s activities in other Central and Eastern European countries that make up a market characterised as “attractive and interesting.”