The number of individuals with outstanding loans registered inthe database of the Credit Bureau, has remained steady since thebeginning of the year, at 4.4 million, but the number of clientsbehind on their payments rose by 45% during this period, to around650,000 people.
The share of clients with overdue amounts thus approaches 15% ofbanks' overall retail clients. "The share of overdue amounts is notalarming, although it climbed from 0.96% in October 2008 to 2.28%of overall amounts in October this year," says Serban Epure,general manager of the Credit Bureau, the institution created bybanks to collect data on loans granted to individuals.
However, many clients contracted credits from several banks. Forinstance, one individual is registered as having taken out creditsfrom no fewer than 19 banks. Such cases emerged in the contextwhere banks started to send positive data to the Credit Bureau, aswell - data on loans granted to clients, irrespective of whetherthey are late payers or not.
At present, Romanians have outstanding loans worth 60.2 billion RON(14 billion euros) in RON and foreign currency loans worth 62.8billion RON (14.6 billion euros).
Overdue amounts account for a larger share of the total for loansin RON, which climbed from 1.41% to 2.77% between October 2008 andSeptember 2009. Overdue amounts make up a smaller share of foreigncurrency loans, but the decline was faster over the past year, from0.35% to 1.23%.
"During the crisis period, overdue amounts rose quicker," saysEpure. Clients with loans in foreign currencies were affected bythe major exchange rate depreciation recorded at the end of 2008and at the beginning of 2009, with the euro climbing by around 17%,in just four months, from 3.65 to 4.3 RON. The hardest hit werethose who took out loans in 2007, when the euro had slipped towards3.2 - 3.1 RON.
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