Tiberiu Moisă, Deputy Managing Director MidCorporate & SME at Banca Transilvania, attended the KRUK Summit of Now Conference, organized by KRUK in partnership with Ziarul Financiar, on 24-25 November, where he made the following statements:

• For the period ahead, the only relevant fear is that of the unknown. Uncertainty feels in my stomach the most, at least in economics, entrepreneurship. People can get used to a lot of things, they can adapt, but it's much harder to do that with something you don't know. The fear that we don't know what's coming is what creates a kind of stress in the economy. You don't see it yet in the numbers, in the credit quality. It's in the air somewhere, on an individual level. It is a stress that has a very clear motivation, but it is also multiplied when we all talk about it.
  
  
• Sometimes we call these segments, from small companies, to medium-sized companies, so-called corporations, medium-sized, we also call them entrepreneurial segments because there the decisions are very much influenced by the mood of the owners. There, these coping mechanisms, just as in the case of the population, are immediately visible because lower consumption leads to lower sales and then they try to rationalize. They don't just try to optimize their costs based on how they're prepared, they can also make investments that lead to cost optimization over time. When you have investments in digitalization, technology, from my point of view, all this adaptive behavior in the coming period, as long as you stay on a tepid growth horizon, but which is also not recession, all this adaptive behavior will do its job.
  
  
• The question that matters is what we have to do, how we can stimulate behavior to catalyze our growth engines because Romania is not an island separated from the rest of the world where we have time for our own challenge and the rest of the world is waiting for us.
  
  
• It is important that as we adapt we also look to the future. Romania has highly certain potential growth engines. There will be significant funds pumping into critical areas, infrastructure. I am convinced that in a warm environment to come and see certain successes, inaugurations, new investments, good economic news, can stimulate behavior, especially in the entrepreneurial area which is dependent on confidence and comfort.
  
  
• When you look at an entrepreneur who prefers not to reinvest the profit they earn, but to return the money in the form of an associated loan, you wonder why they do this on a widespread scale.
  
  
• The more you stress the economy, the more inflation goes up, the more interest rates go up, the more resilience is reduced, but I think we are in a good area. We see a well-proportioned resilience.
  
  
• I see a very good time for courageous decisions when courage, as an economic calculation, makes sense.
  
  
• These loans that started in the pandemic and had a run of 5 consecutive years went through the roof. Then they were over-consumed, which caused credit volumes to grow artificially as well. What we see in deterioration in quality I would say is only marginal. The percentage worsening also occurs because the base is shrinking. It is repaid at a more accelerated pace. When there are no more subsidies to receive, grants, perks, you have no incentive to keep those credits. Then, at least this year, there was a generalized phenomenon of early repayment that we saw.
  
  
• Further stress was created when the state decided not to continue funding certain projects from public sources, except according to certain criteria that they set. Naturally, this has put the whole construction sector under stress.