“The banks paying the highest average salaries are not corporate banks and do not have any branches throughout the country to ‘upset’ the salary average because of a greater diversity in their structure, not just high-earning employees,” said Alina Popescu, talent information solution leader for Romania and the Balkan region with Mercer, part of Marsh & McLennan Companies.
Citibank, which had 217 employees on average in 2015, pays a net average salary of more than RON13,200 per month, three times higher than the system average (RON4,236 in net amount per month).
“Citibank is some sort of representative office in Romania, not a full-fledged bank. They sold the retail operations a while ago and probably kept the office here because of the global customers who expect to be able to work with them in Romania, as well,” said Radu Furnica, chairman of executive search company Leadership Development Solutions.
“Most of the employees are probably corporate banking or risk people, who are highly skilled, hence the high salary average.”
Second highest payer is state-run Eximbank (18th in the system by assets in 2015), where employees earn RON9,800 in net amount per month.
“What is happening at Eximbank is a national shame. That Romanian banks can pay such salaries when their performance is what it is it’s inexplicable. Probably those are politically decided salaries, not set through an objective comparison with the other salaries in the system,” Radu Furnica said.
Although top management salaries cannot influence the salary average in a bank that much, the latest data available show the management at Eximbank is among the highest-paid executives in Romania.
The other highest-paying lenders are very small banks – Bank of Cyprus, BCR Banca pentru Locuinte (of BCR Romania) and Blom Bank, all of them employing 34 to 80 people.
At the bottom of the salary ranking is state-run CEC Bank, where employees earned on average some RON2,850 in net amount per month in 2015, the lowest salary in the entire banking system.
The data ZF centralized show that the top large lender in terms of salaries is ING Bank, which has almost 1,500 employees and pays more than RON7,100 in net average salary per month. ING, which ranks 7th by assets in the system, also ranks 7th by salaries.
“I am not at all surprised that ING pays its employees well, it confirms my expectations of them. ING made a lot of money in our country because of the situation of our currency at the time they entered Romania and recouped their investment really fast,” Leadership Development Solutions’ Radu Furnica said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)