2005: BCR privatized

 In the summer of 2001, Raiffeisen Bank took over Banca Agricolă, the third-largest player at the time. The total value of the sale was $52 million, of which $37 mln made up a capital investment, and the rest the price paid for shares. In 2004, Porsche Bank opened a branch in Romania, to finance car sales by the country’s top importer.

Wiener Städtische, which changed its name to Vienna Insurance Group (VIG), came onto the Romanian market in 2001, with the acquisition of a 51 percent stake in the Unita insurance company, in a transaction worth DM 6 million. A year earlier, the European market leader, German Allianz group, took over a majority share of the ASIT insurer for $12 million. The year 2005 gave way to the most spectacular transactions in the insurance industry at that time, with Wiener Städtische buying 73 percent of Omniasig shares for €64 million from TBI Holding. Two years later, the same Austrians, now named VIG, took over 30 percent of the Asirom insurer at a cost of some €47 mln from businessman Ion Nicolae. At that price, Asirom was valued by the buyer at over €153 million. The great potential of the local banking market and a “low level of population banking,” as one top banker named this, also attracted Greek investments, such as that in Bancpost in 2002, the first bank to be fully privatized. Bancpost’s majority shareholder is now EFG Eurobank Ergasias. This transaction was followed a year later by the acquisition of a majority share in Banca Românască by the National Bank of Greece (NBG) group.