BRD, which has increased its staff by almost 3,800 people to 9,443 over the last three years, has frozen hiring ‘until further notice’, as a result of Société Générale group’s strategy to tightly monitor operating expenses in order to adjust to the market decline.

"As far as costs are concerned, operating expenses will be tightly monitored. We started to implement a decision to freeze hiring in mid 2008, which will be applied until further notice. We also stopped our network expansion, considering we have reached the target desired for this country," Didier Valet, chief financial officer of Société Générale told a banking conference in Paris.

In 2008, the number of BRD employees, including the subsidiaries of the group, went up by 954 to 9,443, almost equal to the BCR group’s, which had 9,985 employees by December 31. At the same time, BRD opened 124 branches, reaching a total of 930.

Valet restated the support BRD could expect to get from its majority shareholder but added that Société Générale’s overall strategy was to encourage its branches to rely on local financing acquired in form of deposits and slow down lending as preventive measure.

"In the current environment where liquidity is low, Société Générale’s global strategy is to limit foreign financing of subsidiaries and concentrate on attracting deposits from local markets, along with reducing the speed of lending growth as a preventive measure, if necessary," Valet stated.

According to Valet, he has already "pushed" BRD to focus on attracting deposits, both in euros and in RON. At the end of March, BRD started to cut rates on euro deposits, after having raised them to 7.25% a year.

Société Générale is one of the nine banks that signed an official statement on March 26 whereby they committed before the IMF, the Romanian authorities and those in their countries of origin to ma