Before coming to BCR in 2006, she had had an almost 10-year career in consultancy, first at Arthur Andersen, and then at successor firm Ernst&Young.
There she built the financial services division that helped her become familiar with the problems of the largest bank on the market before joining its executive management team.
She was the first Romanian selected by Andreas Treichl, head of Erste, for a position in BCR’s top management, first as vice-president in charge of operations and IT and since 2010 of retail.
According to banking industry rules, Petrescu could not have continued her banking career at a rival bank for at least one year, considering the large volume of sensitive information she had access to.
She returns to consultancy, but to a different company than Ernst&Young (E&Y), which she left in 2006. E&Y has been auditing BCR’s financial statements for six years based on a contract with Erste, the majority shareholder of BCR.
“I will work directly with a team of 30-40 consultants specializing in strategy and operations, human capital, technology and financial services, who already provide services to a large number of banks and institutions,” said Petrescu.
She says the complexity of challenges faced by clients at this time is “huge”. “The assets of a company as a whole (both the available capital and the natural resources and occupied workforce) are dwindling. Economic growth (where there is any) is fragile and the market’s ability to attract capital is significantly limited, as is banks’ ability to finance new projects.”
Her experience at BCR: successes, as well as challenges
Since she came to BCR in the autumn of 2006, Petrescu was involved in key moments for the transformation of BCR and for bringing local standards in line with those of Erste Group, and in 2010 she handled the very difficult stage of adjusting lending contracts to the new terms of Ordinance 50, which eliminated the early repayment fee for retail loans. Then she handled the adjustment of the whole portfolio of products for individual clients.
Erste complained that the start of the crisis towards the end of 2008 did not allow the bank to deepen the restructuring of BCR and Andreas Treichl said at the beginning of this year that the bank should have looked differently now after all the management decisions made in the past few years.
The adjustment of an institution with over 10,000 people and hundreds of units has proven a tough challenge, marked by shocks such as raising VAT and cuts to public sector employees’ salaries in the summer of 2010.
“For me it was a very intense period, full of successes, a time during which I learned to understand how a problem was seen at a local branch, in Parliament and in Vienna – a time when I learned not to make assumptions, to respect extremely varied opinions and to have the discipline of never losing sight of the problem at hand,” Petrescu said.
Last autumn she decided to withdraw as executive vice-president for retail, believing she has achieved her main targets in that area and that the day-to-day coordination of this sector on a market that doesn’t grow wasn’t motivating enough.
What important lessons has she learned as a BCR manager?
“In order to have sustainable results, it is important to choose: when to go fast and when to wait for the others – so that everybody reaches the destination. (…) Sometimes it’s vital to get fast results: other times it’s best to persuade, wait, do things more slowly, but more solidly.’
Petrescu suggested by this the difficulties of setting an optimal pace of BCR’s restructuring, between the desire of the Austrian bank to hurry the adjustment to Erste standards and the organization’s ability to digest changes, i.e. the management’s ability to make them acceptable and get them to be assimilated.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)