CONTEXT:

• The economy never has an easy life after a busy election year. It is preparing to bear, in 2025, the price of postponed reforms and the cost of election-year measures. Entrepreneurs, company managers and financial institutions are trying to anticipate the measures with which the state, out of the need to correct its deficits, will affect their activity and business plans.
• Regardless of the challenges of this period, the financing of economic prosperity is also expected from the banking system, the capital market and the insurance market.
• A good news and a point of stability in a year that promises to be economically complicated is the health of the financial system, much stronger compared to previous years. Banks have consolidated their balance sheets, achieved very good results, which allow them to support financing in the real economy. The stock market has seen its liquidity improve, and the insurance market has overcome difficult times and is seeking to reestablish itself on sound foundations.
• Credit is showing clear signs of recovery, after a period of decline, when persistent high inflation put pressure on disposable incomes. The population and companies have proven much more prepared than in the past to adapt to the difficulties, so that non-performing loans have remained, at least so far, low.
• Corporate financing is recovering, however, much more slowly, in a context in which local businesses are in great need of capitalization. The cost of financing matters, and decisions on interest rates are measured with caution by central banks, as they must balance, in a fragile balance, the need to reduce inflation and reduce the risk of a recession.
• The problems of public finances, marked by a huge burden of the budget deficit, threaten to be transmitted most strongly further into the economy. The business environment and financial markets have already been affected by several packages of fiscal measures, which have only managed to patch up public finances. New tax increases in 2025 are considered inevitable by most analysts and business representatives.
• Banks have not been spared fiscal surprises either. The “gift” of a special tax of 2% of turnover, which is added to the corporate income tax, risks becoming permanent, although it was supposed to be a temporary crisis measure. So far, bankers have adapted by carefully weighing how much of the additional costs they can pass on to clients, since they too have been affected in a complicated economic period.
• The capital market, the insurance market, and pension funds may also be affected by fiscal measures, if they see their development prospects undermined again.
• Beyond the uncertainties of this period, solutions for economic recovery and growth, in a difficult environment, can only work by involving the financial markets, regardless of whether they are measures in the area of ​​government support programs or private sector initiatives.
• In the last hundred meters, hopes for future growth are placed in the financing that will be attracted through the PNRR, a plan in which the involvement of the banking system is essential. However, the program has delays in implementation and substantial efforts are needed to avoid marking again, as in the past, a new loss of funds and development opportunities.
• In a period marked by uncertainty, which is not lacking in geopolitical tensions or the approach of wars, managers of financial institutions are looking for solutions not only for adapting to the difficult economic, social and political context, but especially for reinvention and innovation in a world undergoing rapid technological change.

DISCUSSION TOPICS:

Panel 1 – Challenges for bank financing

• What effects will the new fiscal measures have on the banking system.
• The banking market’s perspective on budgetary and macroeconomic uncertainties.
• The evolution of banking indicators. Growth prospects for lending and savings. Implications of interest rate increases.
• Changes in risk assessment.
• Consolidation in the banking system. Prospects for large and small banks after a recent wave of mergers and acquisitions.
• The impact of legislative changes targeting the banking system.
• How has the relationship between customers and banks changed?
• The outlook for government guarantee programs, which support a large part of bank loans. What is going well and what improvements are needed.
• Support for entrepreneurship by banks.
• How banking networks continue to transform and services to be digitized.
• Banking products of the future, innovations that change the market.
• Prospects for bank profitability, after a period of exceptional results.
• Prospects for central bank monetary and supervisory policy.
• Financing large infrastructure and strategic projects.
• Challenges for state financing, in the era of huge deficits.
• Cybersecurity challenges.

Panel 2 – Challenges for the capital market

• Evolutions and prospects for the stock market.
• How did the stock market capitalize on the opportunities that arose after gaining emerging market status?
• How do international tensions affect the Romanian capital market? What domestic measures can mitigate the problems?
• Challenges for stock market liquidity. New listings. Obstacles and solutions. New measures needed to further unfreeze the primary offering market.
• The impact of new fiscal measures on the markets. How will the new fiscal regime influence the attractiveness of the market and how can the base of individual investors be broadened? How can individual investors be convinced to come to the capital market, in order to have access to better returns, in a context in which interest rates are also rising in the banking market.
• The effects of fiscal measures on the private pension market. Is the current contribution deductibility threshold, unchanged since 2009, still sufficient to support market development?
• Challenges for private pension fund investments in volatile markets.

Transformations in investment policy and necessary changes in pension fund legislation.

• How can investment funds empower the available resources of Romanians in this difficult period?
• Overcoming bottlenecks in the bond market.
• Challenges for government securities and bond portfolios in the context of
• What will the derivatives market look like and what liquidity can we rely on in the coming years?
• Improving financial education – one of the priorities of non-banking financial markets.

Panel 3 – Challenges for the insurance market

• What impact does the crisis have on the activity of insurers? Which policies are customers turning to?
• Prospects for health insurance, in the context of changing customer behavior after the health crisis.
• Solutions so that the market is no longer overwhelmingly dominated by mandatory insurance. Life and health protection (voluntary) vs. property protection (imposed by law).
• Challenges for the RCA market: How can it become profitable again? The effect of frequent legislative changes. Where the parties that sometimes unfortunately come into conflict meet: insurers – service providers – customers.
• Will the digitalization of insurers continue after the pandemic-forced measures?
• What will be the impact of the slowdown in credit demand on insurers?

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