The clients of ING Bank Romania can apply for and receive a personal needs loan online starting this September. The application for the loan is done through the bank’s Home’Bank platform and the money is transferred to the client’s current account within as little as 15 minutes, the bank said.

The online personal needs loan is identical to the one available for contracting in the ING units. The maximum value that can be contracted is RON 90,000 (some EUR 19,600). It has the same conditions and costs, and is made possible with the help of the online signature, which the client receives when applying for the credit. The digital certificate is issued by InfoCERT SPA Italy, a developer of software solutions and the largest certification authority in Europe. The certified electronic signature is obtained at no costs.

The stages of receiving an instant online credit include filling in the personal data, receiving the electronic signature, the verification of the client’s solvability with the tax authority ANAF and with the Credit Bureau, the electronic signing of the loan documents, and the transfer of the sum to the client’s current account.

In order to be eligible for a credit, the client needs to be at least 18 years old, to have been employed for at least a year and a half with their current employer, and to have stable revenues, either a salary or a pension, reported with ANAF, of at least RON 1,000 (almost EUR 220). The evaluation fee for the loan is of RON 200 (EUR 43), and the annual interest rate varies between 8.25% and 11.95%.

The bank said most of its clients prefer to interact online. Some 95% of them chose to interact with ING using the online channel, and only 5% choose the ING units or the call center. The number of interactions and client requests via mobile devices also doubled over the past year.

At the end of the first semester of 2017, over 700,000 clients used the Home’ Bank service. They logged in over 35 million times, and in 63% of the cases from mobile phones. During the same time frame, ING clients performed over 10.4 million transactions from the bank’s app, 26% more than in the similar period of 2016.

Overall, the Internet connectivity rate grew by 11% over the past two years in Romanian households, according to data provided by the bank. It reached 72%, while the European average stands at 85%.

At the same time, Romanians are avid social media users but less so when it comes to Internet banking. Still, the local e-commerce market doubled in the past two years, and 80% of the youth aged 16 to 34 went online from mobile devices.

The penetration rate of online banking in the country grew especially from mobile devices. The number of logins to Internet banking accounts from smartphones grew by 214%, from 40.6 million to 87 million between 2015 and 2016. At the same time, the number of transactions performed on a mobile phone during the same time frame grew by 207%, from 6 million to 12.7 million transactions.

editor@romania-insider.com