Months of digging through the legislative maze, nights spent at the office, no lunch breaks, and the loss of important people.

These are but a few of the aspects of the recently completed merger between HVB Bank Romania and Banca Tiriac. Dan Pascariu, the chairman of the bank therefrom created, talks to BUSINESS Magazin (BM) for the first time about the difficulties that came up during the 12 months since the start of the merger process.

The two banks began operating as one on September 1, under the name of HVB-Tiriac.

"The legal side of the merger gave us the worst headache, because the legislation is neither clear enough, nor developed enough to regulate a merger," says Dan Pascariu.

The second component, the technical integration, seemed the simplest of all, as long as it was only about applying procedural steps, with preset deadlines. It only seemed that way, because the battle with deadlines was not that easy in the end: the IT staff had to bring sleeping bags over to the office during the last few days before the migration of the IT systems of the two banks to the new platform. Neither the internal communication, nor the human resources team had an easier life, with lunch breaks suspended and working hours extending long into the night.

The merger began with establishing the differences between the two banks, says Dan Pascariu. Once an inventory of differences was built up, the common factors in each segment were identified and the best practices for the operation of the new bank were chosen. The biggest advantage here was the complementarity of the two banks, with Banca Tiriac a mass market bank and HVB specialising on the top end segment. This ruled out a host of overlapping issues that would have had to be dealt with.

Personnel-wise, however, employees were put under immense mental strain as they faced uncertainty over how