Bank deposits covered by Deposit Guarantee Fund

Bank Deposit Guarantee Fund guarantees all the placements made by individual depositors with banks in the system, regardless of the account type – deposit, current, savings account or the currency in which the savings are kept.

In cases where the client has both a deposit and a loan taken out from the same bank the amount compensated in the event of bankruptcy will be calculated based on both balances. As a result, the client will get money back only after their debt to the bank has been settled. Credits taken out by the population, however, are three billion euros higher than the amounts saved across the entire banking system. Nicolae Vulpescu, the general manager of Fund, provided explanations about deposit guarantees in a release issued after “requests received.” The individuals’ deposit guarantee cap currently stands at 20,000 euros, but will go up to 50,000 euros soon, according to a decision of the finance ministers of the EU. The decision needs to be implemented in the national legislation first and then implemented. According to Vulpescu, the cap increase will be operated some time “in the next few days.” At present, all banks that operate as Romanian legal entities are part of the Fund’s guarantee scheme, that is 32 lenders. The list of participating banks is available on the Fund’s website, at www.fgdb.ro. The banks that operate in Romania as a branch of a group based in the European Union participate to the guarantee Funds in the countries of origin of their parent banks. For instance, ING and Garanti Bank, which operate as branches of Dutch banks last week announced they had raised the individuals’ deposit guarantee caps (including sums in current or savings accounts) to the equivalent of 100,000 euros, compared with the previous 38,000 euros, thus complying with the decision made by the Dutch authorities. On June 30, the Deposit Guarantee Fund had about 300 million euros in equity capital, covering approximately 1.2% of the total deposits guaranteed. At the same time, the Fund signed agreements for stand-by credits with the commercial banks in the system, which enable it to draw up to 190 million euros should a significant need for cash arise. The total nominal value of deposits stood at 234.1 billion RON (65 billion euros), and the number of deposit holders in the system reached 19.4 million, 95.10% of which were individuals.