The National Bank of Romania did not wait for the special law regulating transparency in the lending process and has already demanded banks to very clearly specify in all the contracts concluded with their clients as of this month how the interests operated are computed.
“As everybody is already aware, the enactment of a special law to improve transparency in the lending process is now discussed. Since its enactment is yet to materialise, we (the NBR i.e.) thought as early as two months ago to send banks a letter instructing them to specify in every loan contract closed how they calculate interests on the banking products/services, which are the object of those contracts. We have allowed them more time until the actual enforcement so that they could get to modify their internal rules, clear their standard form stocks wherever applies and so on and so forth. We, however, wanted to meet that law halfway. We want to have banks regarded as partners by the population as a result of this measure, ” NBR vice-governor Mihai Bogza told Ziarul Financiar.
The measure taken by the central bank comes after a long time when banks and retailers have taken advantage of the lack of a regulation in this regard and avoided specifying the true costs of the funding offered in every single case. On the other hand, this measure might be regarded as a damper put on the much too fast lending growth, which phenomenon is still closely monitored by the central bank.
What do those directly or indirectly targeted (banks and retailers) have to say about this?
BCR, the largest Romanian bank and implicitly the bank that accounts for the largest share of the non-governmental lending, has already taken most of the steps required by the NBR, as its officials say.
“It is only natural that any client should be fully aware of all the terms of a loan or of the services provided by the BCR Group. The regulation of the central bank comes practically in support for BCR’s policy to protect and help its clients, under transparency conditions,” Cornel Cojocaru, BCR’s spokesman told Ziarul Financiar.
Therefore BCR’s clients will know exactly that the monthly interest for a loan will be computed by a formula, which sees as denominator the product derived from multiplying the amount of the loan by the annual interest the bank charges and by the number of days in a month (30 days) and as numerator the product obtained from multiplying the number of days in one year (360 under the banking law) by 100%. Raiffeisen, a bank that sees lending growing fast, has set things straight, as well.
The other side, i.e. the retailers, fully agrees with the transparency measures gradually required of them.
“We agree with the introduction of steps to make presenting as much info about the costs entailed by a loan as possible mandatory. Actually we want to introduce cost aspects, such as the interest of the loan even on the price tags of the various products on shelves,” said Lorand Szarvadi, managing director of Interexpo, the company that owns the home appliances and electronics chain Domo.
This opinion is backed by the other players on the market, like Altex and Flanco.
oana.nuta@zf.ro