Oana Ilaș: "We are on the right track. The degree of financial inclusion in Romania has reached almost 70%"

Oana Ilaș, Deputy Managing Director of BT Retail Banking, participated in the Centre for Alternative Dispute Resolution in Banking(CSALB) podcast on financial education.

Engaged in a dialogue with Cornel Dinu, founder of Banking News, Oana Ilaș discussed: the long-term relationship between banks and consumers, increasing customer awareness of credit-related products, the evolution of consumer behaviour between 2020 and 2022, and Romania's premises regarding financial inclusion.

• Reconciliation is an extremely important step in taking contractual relations between banks and consumers to another level, where dialogue is much more present. We have seen a paradigm shift in recent years and more and more consumers are coming to the bank in the first instance to have this dialogue. Reconciliation puts the medium and long-term health of this relationship on a much better footing.

• Lately we have seen more and more clients who, when they want to buy a property - after a dialogue with the representative of the financial institution - become aware of all the associated costs, not only those related to the loan itself. The larger you take a building, which may not be at a higher energy level, the higher the loan rate, the higher the maintenance, the higher the repair costs, the building may not be in the best condition and you will have to incur collateral costs.

• We have seen dramatic changes in customer behaviour in recent years, with many embracing online payments with the pandemic and starting to stop using cash so much. Cash, as a proportion, has decreased significantly in what happens in a banking unit, and the banking unit has become dialogue-oriented, advice-oriented.

• We've seen less appetite lately for customers to engage in impulse buying, they are saving a higher proportion of what they earn, even though there is pressure on their real income.

• The level of non-performing loans is currently at an all-time low in Romania. Certainly, the entry into this more difficult period has been made on completely different premises than in the past when we have experienced crises of various kinds.

• I think banks have also matured with consumers and this contributes to the perception that we trust each other more. On the other hand, consumers have become much more demanding in their relationship with banks and I think that is very healthy.

• Even if Romania is still at the bottom of Europe in terms of education and financial inclusion, I say that we are on the right track and this can be seen in the financial inclusion rates - an increase of 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2022, up to 70%. We still have room to improve, to reach out to rural areas more, because with digitisation we are breaking away a bit from this dependence on the territorial footprint.

Watch the full interview below.