In Crisis Romanians Turn to Banks to Erase Their Debts

Romania is one of the countries which, along other European ones, is going to be hit hardly by the crisis. The first signs of recession in Romania already appeared, as we presented in a previous post, and Romanians are forced to find alternative solutions for settling their debts and survive financially. For some time, the possibility to postpone the payment of the installments for a period of up to 9 months functioned and tens of thousands Romanians used this. But this is not enough, and some approached other ways to settle their debts with the banks. On of these alternatives solutions is The Alternative Banking Dispute Resolution Center – CSALB.

Banks in Romania continue to make significant concessions to those who turn to the CSALB. An example is the case of a family in Bucharest whose bank has wiped out more than 43,000 Swiss francs in debt and closed the loan.

The case of a family in a difficult situation in Bucharest exemplifies both the solutions that can be obtained by Romanian people with CSALB and the contribution of conciliators in the negotiation process, as well as the actual activity in online conciliation, which became a habit during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions. Thus, a family with three children, who were paying their installments heavily on two loans denominated in CHF, at two different banks, obtained in the Center the complete cancellation of debt and a 30% reduction of another loan. All this has happened in less than half a year since the first application was submitted.

According to a press release, from the beginning of the year CSALB received 972 applications addressed to banks and 255 applications addressed to Non Financial Institutions – NFIs. So far, 247 applications have been accepted for negotiation by banks and only 11 by NFIs.

To these are added 120 amicably resolved requests (banks and NFIs), after notifying CSALB (these requests have not entered the negotiation procedure, the agreement between the two parties was reached directly). The rest of the applications are in the analysis phase or have been rejected by banks / NFIs for objective or unjustified reasons. In the last four years, the benefits obtained by consumers from the negotiations exceed 3 million euros.

Approximately 20% of the cases solved by CSALB have benefits exceeding 5,000 Euros and were obtained through reductions or complete deletions of the balance, the decrease of commissions or interests and/or the refund of amounts collected in the past.