HVB Tiriac has so far found almost 1,000 individual customers owning liquid assets of over 100,000 euros, who thus benefit from top services of the private banking category. The average value of an individual portfolio even goes as far as 200,000 euros.
"We also have a group of customers whose portfolios go beyond 5 million euros," Monica Ionescu, head of private banking with HVB-Tiriac, told ZF. She says that over 70% of these customers are from Bucharest.
HVB Tiriac's private banking unit has managed to outstrip major rivals such as ING and Raiffeisen in terms of the number of customers, with the former two reporting 500 customers each. In terms of assets managed, ING did not reveal their volume, while Raiffeisen speaks of around 200m euros.
At the end of last year, HVB Tiriac was managing private banking customer assets worth around 160 million euros, up 60% against 2005. Monica Ionescu says the increase was brought about both by the fact that the bank got new customers from Banca Tiriac, in the wake of the merger closed in September 2006, and by the significant increase of the already existing customers. To benefit from the special private banking services, a customer must hold liquid assets worth at least 100,000 euros. Ionescu says that depending on market expansion conditions, this market will also witness segmentation in terms of customers and provided services.
Ionescu has already identified some individual customers of UniCredit Romania holding over 100,000 euros in their accounts and who can become private banking clients as UniCredit does not offer such services. Thus, she estimates that after the merger between HVB Tiriac and UniCredit is concluded in June, the private banking department of the future bank will have more than 1,000 customers.
Bankers specialised in this field are reluctant to publicly talk about the yields p
