Banca Comercială Română to Launch an Instant Payment Service with Zero Fees for Operations Performed through George Account

Payments to other banks via George account will soon become much easier and faster
BCR’s retail customers can perform inter-bank transactions of up to RON 50,000 within less than ten seconds, every day of the year, at any time of the day or of the night
Operations are free of charge if performed via George account
The new service is available starting from January and is part of BCR’s smart payment system, under which George Pay, Apple Pay or the contactless system in transport means of 11 cities of the country have been launched in the past year.

Bucharest, 30 January 2020 – Banca Comercială Română launches an Instant Payment Service that allows customers to perform transactions within less than ten seconds to banks that have operationalized this system, at any time of the day and on every day of the year. Instant payments can be made in relation to transfers in an amount of up to RON 50,000, and the service is available to all retail customers for payments and collections through George digital platform. In case of companies with an account opened with BCR, for now, the service is available only for collections.

Marian Ignat, Digital Banking BCR Executive Officer, stated that, “The demand of consumers for real-time payments from their personal accounts to any account of Romania has been increasing, and the instant payment structure enables us to connect all bank accounts across the country when all local banks joins this service.

We believe in open platforms and, through this implementation, we succeed to provide our customers with a full payment ecosystem through George, which includes all payment possibilities existing in the market (instant payments, utility payments, treasury payments, OR code-scanning payments, international payments, SEPA payments, George Pay/NFC Android, and Apple Pay – in app provisioning)”.

The Instant Payment Service has been developed by TRANSFOND, the administrator and operator of the Automated Clearing House for Interbank Payments, in collaboration with the Romanian Association of Banks and the National Bank of Romania. Instant Payments represent the fastest option for secure money transfers. These are processed by TRANSFOND, and the clearing is finalized by the National Bank of Romania.

BCR joined the Instant Payment Service offered by TransFond, with support from Allevo, which provides the FinTP-Instant connection solution. FinTP-Instant is a function of the FinTP application, which is provided under an open-source regime.

For individual payments, the fees charged are:

RON 0, for holders of a George account;
RON 1, for holders of TotalCont, One and Erste Private Banking packages;
RON 4, for customers having ClasiCont, Youth and Comod accounts.

For amounts coming into the accounts of BCR customers as a result of interbank transfers made through Instant Payment, the fee is zero for individual collections, while corporate customers and SMEs pay a fee of RON 4, similar to that applicable to standard collections.

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Banca Comercială Română (BCR), member of Erste Group, is one of the most important financial groups of Romania, and includes universal bank operations (retail, corporate & investment banking, treasury and capital markets), as well as specialized companies in the leasing market, private pensions and housing banks.

BCR offers a full range of financial products and services through a network of 21 business centres and 22 mobile offices dedicated to companies and 431 retail units located in most towns of the country having over 10,000 inhabitants. BCR is bank no. 1 in Romania in the bank transaction market, and its customers benefit from the largest national ATM network – 2,000 ATMs, 15,300 POSs and full Internet banking, Mobile banking, Phone-banking and E-commerce services.

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Erste Group is one of the main providers of financial services of the eastern part of the European Union. A number of 47,700 employees serve 16.2 million customers through 2,500 subsidiaries in 7 countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia). At the end of 2018, Erste Group was holding total assets of EUR 236.8 billion, recorded a net profit of EUR 1.79 billion and had a tier 1 equity common ratio (fully implemented Basel 3) of 13.5%.

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BCR – Corporate Communication

Cătălin Ioniță, e-mail:catalin.ionita@bcr.ro, phone no.: 0740.247.336

This information is available also on our website at: www.bcr.ro

For further details on BCR’s products and services, please use the following contact methods:

InfoBCR

Web: www.bcr.ro

Email: contact.center@bcr.ro

TelVerde: 0800.801.BCR (0800.801.227), which can be dialled free of charge from all national phone networks.