George Călinescu, CFO BT: Macroeconomic, 2024 will be a relatively good year

George Călinescu, Deputy CFO, attended the Deloitte CFO Summit 2024 conference. Some of his statements on the evolution of lending in 2024 and the macroeconomic climate for this year, taken by ZF, you can watch below.

• We believe that, macro-economically, 2024 will be a relatively good year. You have seen the estimates, including at the European level, even though there are scenarios that look at the possibility of delays in interest rate cuts and accelerating positive developments in the economy respectively, the baseline scenario is one where interest rates will fall. Maybe not in the next month, but they will fall somewhere around mid-year.
  
  
• We expect credit developments to be positive in 2024. On the one hand, there are still government programmes, but there are also developments from the entrepreneurial environment that need to develop. For us, 2023, as you know, came in with an above market development, with 12.5% growth and if we go by sectors and retail and corporate we grew above the average level of our competition.
  
  
• We have reached an average level of almost 2 million card transactions per day. This shows us that banking is growing, but there is still room for growth and we will see growth in non-credit related activities in the coming years.
  
  
• NPLs at the banking system level fell from 2.65% to 2.33%, which shows the behaviour of customers in terms of paying their instalments: quite healthy.
  
  
• Challenges this year: I think there will be major differences between sectors and between businesses - we see sectors that are doing very well, but also sectors that are suffering from declining consumption or from not collecting their government bills. The need for digitisation and the speed at which customer expectations are rising requires a greater degree of complementarity between business financial requirements and the banking services offered. We are continuing to refine BT's services and products by investing in innovation and digitalisation.
  
  

More statements from the conference can be found here.