Romanian banks' chance: regional support centres

At present, there are a lot of banks interested in Romania, as the market has a great potential volume, therefore the chance of the local players would be to hurry and develop regional service centres to serve foreign markets, considers Steven van Groningen, the chairman of Raiffeisen Bank.
“Foreign banks’ interest may be a threat, but also an opportunity to the extent that we will develop regional processing and support centres,” says van Groningen.
A centralised model is very useful primarily for banks with a regional presence, such as Raiffeisen, UniCredit or OTP, which find it relatively easy to bring IT, loan processing or product development functions under unified structures given the similar profiles of the markets in the region.
Last year, UniCredit set up a loan processing centre that inclusively served the parent company of Italy, whilst Raiffeisen is working on an IT data processing centre.
Van Groningen also sees potential in the setting up of call centres for banking services. There are, however, two major conditions for such activities to be successful. “We must have a critical mass and low costs”.
He believes low costs for transactions are needed, although; at present Romanian banks remain relatively expensive in this regard.
“We must be highly efficient, as we have a lot of work to do in this area. However, I can see no improved efforts in this respect. We need large banks, with large platforms and trained personnel,” adds Van Groningen, noting the shortage of human resources on the current banking market, where the number of trained specialists is lagging behind the expansion of banking networks, which is putting pressure on the salaries within the system.
Van Groningen says he strongly believes many of the players planning to provide services in Romania for the so-called European financial passport will not make significant domestic investments. “They just need distribution channels,” he states.
Around 50 foreign banks have notified the NBR of their intention to launch operations in Romania since the beginning of this year.
In conclusion, Van Groningen highlighted the fact that Romania also competes with neighbouring countries in terms of regulations, with the current framework being restrictive and inductive of additional costs.