Weiss, Bancpost: I have a mandate to boost the bank's business

Bancpost is ready to fight to regain the market share lost in the past few years, says Peter Weiss, 51, who at the beginning of the year took over the bank’s executive management, specifying that its Greek shareholder – EFG Eurobank group – wants to continue to support the development of local operations, including with cash freed up after selling the Polish subsidiary.
“I have a mandate to boost the bank’s business,” Weiss told ZF in an interview. Seeing as Bancpost has lost ground over the last few years, he says Eurobank’s ambition is for the local subsidiary to remain a “systemic bank”, which, as defined by the NBR, would mean holding an over 5% market share. At the end of last year, Bancpost’s market share by assets had narrowed to less than 4%, a ten-year low.
The head of Bancpost reaffirms Eurobank’s interest in Romania, after the group recently decided to sell 70% of the Polish subsidiary to Austria’s Raiffeisen, with this being the first move of regional repositioning of a Greek player.
“Our partnership with Raiffeisen in Poland will free up two billion euros in cash, which we will be able to use on other markets in the region, Romania included,” says Weiss. For 2010, the Eurobank group announced Romanian operations had fetched it a net profit of almost 16 million euros (calculated according to international financial reporting standards), after an 8 million-euro loss in 2009.