#Podcast: Ömer Tetik, CEO BT: Romanians are very open to digital news

Ömer Tetik, CEO of BT, was recently invited by Jan Thomson, co-host of the Mullets & money: An Eastern European Equities Podcast, to discuss fintech & technology, similarities between the Romanian market/products and other markets, recommendations for business people thinking about Romania, BT's growth in the coming period, and the bank asset tax.

Ömer Tetik has over 20 years of experience in banking in Romania, Russia and Turkey. Who knows him personally, knows that he is sociable, open and ambitious. So a podcast with the CEO of Banca Transilvania is no surprise. The interview is in English, but we have extracted the most important ideas: 

• Fintech & technology: Romanians are very open to everything that is new in this area and they want the technology they find in London to be used in Romania as soon as possible. BT's ambition is to be an early adopter in the fintech area in order to offer our customers efficiency and speed with the help of technology. With these ideas in mind we launched last year the first banking wallet in Romania, BT Pay, as well as BT Store, a platform that offers online non-banking solutions for SMEs in HR, healthcare, financial accounting, consulting, e-commerce, etc. We continue our digital jurney in 2019 and we are preparing to launch a new internet banking with many new options.

• Similarities between the Romanian market and other markets: The perception of banks in the world is much the same. As an industry, it is not a beloved industry. Similarities between Turkish and Romanian banking products are quite strong in the SME area for credit cards and microfinance. Romanians are close in culture to Turks in the sense that they are very eager to get a certain banking product, but also in the way that they are quicker to listen to what the salesman tells them than to read the bank documents.

• Recommendations for business people planning to move to Romania: it is a very good business environment, be careful to find good partners from the beginning (customers, employees, shareholders) and do folow-up because deadlines are sometimes missed.

• Future bank acquisitions by BT: For the time being we are not looking for other markets, we want to consolidate on what we have in Romania and Moldova.

• Additional tax on bank assets: There has been some progress in the dialogue and discussions on additional taxes on bank assets in recent times. We expect that it will not be adopted in its initial form, perhaps it will be closer in form to what exists now in Poland and Hungary.