ING Romania ups loan portfolio by close to a third, posts higher profit

ING Romania, the local subsidiary of Dutch banking group ING, managed to increase its loan portfolio and its deposit base by almost a third while also posting double-digit profit growth in 2015. The bank’s loan portfolio reached EUR 3.2 billion at the end of December 2015, up by 29% compared to December 2015. The loans in local currency increased by 60%. ING thus increased its market share on the loans segment from 4.8%, at the end of 2014, to 6.3%. The total deposits from clients also went up by 29% last year, to EUR 4.1 billion. The bank’s share in the overall bank deposits in Romania also rose from 6% to 6.9%. ING Romania posted a gross profit of over EUR 88 million, 22% higher than in 2014, based on higher revenues as well as lower risk costs. The non-performing loans ratio dropped from 5.7% in December 2014 to 5.1% in December 2015, which is way lower compared to the local banking system’s average. “This is the best year I’ve seen in my career at ING,” said the bank’s Polish CEO Michal Szczurek. “I think ING’s biggest accomplishment in 2015 is the lending increase both for companies and individuals. We also increased our financing for SMEs, offering them corporate standard services, and we’ve made progress in digitizing thus reducing our trading costs,” he explained. ING reached 7,000 SME clients in 2015, up from 5,125 in 2014, and recorded a 77% increase in loans to SMEs year-on-year. The individual client base reached 866,000. The bank added 96,000 active individual clients last year, up from 40,000 in 2014. One of the most popular products was the instant credit, which the bank approves in 10 minutes. ING is also the market leader in terms of online payments, holding a 40% share of all internet and mobile banking transactions in Romania, according to its data. The bank also has a 17% share of all the card payments in Romania. “We will see an explosion of digital banking starting this year,” Michal Szczurek thinks. He expects more clients to access ING’s HomeBank online banking service from their mobile devices than from desktops this year. Last year, the HomeBank had 23 million sessions from desktop (up by 17% compared to 2014) and 10 million mobile sessions (8 times more than in 2014), according to ING’s data. ING Bank boosts profits in Romania as provision costs down Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com