Finansbank will add three new branches to its network by year-end: one in Oradea (in Oradea Center) and two in Bucharest (on Mosilor and in Plaza Romania) and 15 more branches by the end of next year, mostly for retail and commercial banking.
„Each of the branches costs EUR 100,000 on average, on top of which we can add also IT&T equipment and personnel expenditure. At the end of 2005, we will reach 40 branches,” said Tamer Ozatakul, president of Finansbank in Romania.
He said that Finansbank will have to have various other IT equipment that will add on to the initially -planned costs.
Asset-wise, the bank has EUR 175 million and at the end of this year it will reach EUR 195 million. „We started 2004 with EUR 105 million, and in 2005 we will reach more than EUR 200 million,” said the president.
After the success of the Bucharest Mall-based installment scheme called CardAvantaj, which has sold to date EUR 2 million-worth of goods in the mall via 20,000 cards, Finansbank decided to launch its own card program, with an undisclosed crediting level based on case-to-case clientele scoring. Last week four Visa cards were launched for individual and corporate use, denominated in lei or euros. „We want to reach next year 150,000 Visa credit cards users and 50,000 debit ones. We are also going to expand our CardAvantaj consumer goods installment system to shops outside the Mall,” said Ozatakul.
„We took over the bank in 2002 from BCIC [Banca de Credit Industrial si Comercial] as a 100 percent corporate bank. We started retail operations in 2002 via a consumer loan program developed through Altex [the household appliances retailer]. We have now just about 50,000 consumer loan customers in the bank,” he added.
„In a couple of weeks Finansbank will launch certificate deposits on the market,” said the president. The bank recently started intermediating Orange bill payments, and will soon start to receive Romtelecom payments.
Finansbank has 22 branches, 190,000 customers and 670 employees. „In Romania we plan to launch all of the products we have in Turkey or Germany,” Ozatakul concluded.
