BRD-SocGen to invest about 40m euro in 2003

The investments Banca Romana pentru Dezvoltare – Groupe Societe Generale is planning to make this year will amount to 1,353bn ROL (about 38 million euros) and will be primarily aimed at buying computer systems and improving the product and service range.
The French group has invested, as the bank management says, nearly 5,000bn ROL (more than 180 million euros) since buying the controlling interests in BRD in 1998.
“We will open 5 new offices this year and have 11 more scheduled for 2004. The investments will be primarily aimed at the computerisation of the bank. We will also change our marketing strategy and move on to personalised marketing. In other words, we will move on from the contract to the client approach,” Piere Andre Taullet, BRD-SocGen deputy general manager said during the presentation of the bank’s last year’s results.
The future retail strategy of the bank considers steering the individual consumers to slightly more complex savings products on the one hand, as well as pushing the maturity of various savings instruments towards a year or even more, on the other. “Most of our clients’ deposits are those maturing in 3 to 6 months. We want to change the saving mentality a little by attracting longer maturity deposits, which shows in our interest policy, after all,” Rozaura Stanescu, head of the Retail Banking Products R &D Department said.
The bank will consider launching several products this year. Some of them will be more complex, such as a savings product linked with an insurance policy, primarily aimed at high-income clients, a savings bundle for young people set to offer a card, a student loan and a banking deposit, as well as a product to link together a fixed-interest loan and a fixed-interest deposit.