CEC: We''ll recover our market share

Assets of CEC (Romanian Savings Bank) are currently approaching 5.8 billion RON (1.6 billion euros), after they had exceeded 5.6 billion RON at the end of last year, stated Eugen Radulescu, chairman of the bank. He says that during the last few months of 2005, CEC had managed to stop the drop in the market share in the last few months of 2005 (at some 4.4% last October), and that it has even slightly picked up since the beginning of the year. Compared with the end of 2004, CEC assets are 25% higher in RON and 45% higher in euros. The bank, however, witnessed a slower growth than the market, thus losing ground. “We have started to recover our market share, which will see a stronger growth once the implementation of the IT system is completed. We set out to come close to the 2004 level, of some 5%,” said Radulescu. The bank will soon complete the implementation of an IT system, which would allow a central management of business. Some 700 branches are connected online to the central server located in Bucharest and the other 700 have offline connections (a dial-up connection is used when an operation is conducted). ZF