Răzvan Faer, Transfond: The crisis has slowed the pace of the growth of small payments

The growth pace for small payments has slowed down from 4-5% a year to 1-2% a year, due to the financial crisis, Răzvan Faer, the head of the Strategy and Marketing department of Transfond said yesterday.

He said: "The number of transactions is increasing, but the growth pace is a lot slower. For instance, during the crisis, in the case of small payments, we have seen an almost insignificant growth, of 1 or 2 percent. It used to be 4-5% before, but it was small even then. Perhaps we should review whether the 50.000 lei threshold, which separates small and large payments needs to be adjusted, but this is a technical issue, the problem remains the same, overall: payments are not increasing much and they are a good indicator for a certain state of the economy".

The official of Transfond added that Romania has a huge growth potential on this segment, but exploiting it will depend on the overall growth of the country. Furthermore, compared to countries in the European Union, Romania has a low number of transactions.

Răzvan Faer said: "In Slovenia there are about two million payments made per day. In Romania, the central payment system records 300,000 payments a day, and if we add to that the payments within the treasury and within the bank we might get 600,000 payments a day. In order to run in good conditions, an economy such as the one of Germany makes about 25-30 million payments a day. I don"t think we get 100 million transactions in an entire year, whereas Poland has about 1 billion in the same period".

He said that the number of transactions in Romania is falling because of two reasons: "Either there are a lot of cash transactions being made, or in the rural economy we have a lot of transactions where payment is made < < in kind > >, that is not to call it barter outright".

According to Răzvan Faer, this would explain one of the major differences between Romania and other countries.