“We have 6.7 million Romanians without a bank account. They are invisible,” writes Dan Popa, a journalist specializing in economics, in the editorial below.

Last summer I traveled across the country. In the village of Apusen, my engine stalled out of nowhere. This is repeating itself, I told myself. He did not have cash with him, only a card. I had enough money on my card to fix the problem.

However, there were no ATMs in the village, and I couldn’t even get a bottle of water in the store because there was no POS. I was invisible to them. But for some reason they were also invisible to us. And for banks.

The surplus of ATMs did not compensate for the closing of branches

Sitting with a useless card in my hand, with my PIN pointing to the sky and the magnetic strip to the ground, I was just a drop in the vast ocean of similar events. How did it get here? Previous banking crises and then the pandemic led to the closure of branches deemed unprofitable.

The installation of ATMs did not cover the outflow of physical banking institutions. Banks install ATMs or open branches only when the volume of transactions exceeds a certain threshold, that is, only where it is “profitable”.

Even more tragic, we couldn’t pay a “country mechanic” to look at the engine. I had to hitchhike to the nearest town that had an ATM so I could withdraw money. Then I re-entered the visible world. But, on the other hand, 6.7 million Romanians, fellow citizens without a bank account, remained invisible to the banks.

Millions of ninjas

There are another 6.7 million invisible women in the country, who are hardly talked about. Some say they are Romanian NINJAs (the acronym NINJA comes from No Income, No Job or Asset – people who have no job, income or other assets), but everything is much more difficult.

These are those who refuse to work with banks, or those with whom banks in turn refuse to work.

From the fear of tracking their activities through bank accounts to too low income or payments in envelopes, expensive bank fees, lack of access to banking infrastructure (ATMs or branches) – the range of arguments given by the “invisible” is as follows: complex. And it’s normal for it to be complex, because to consider them ignorant would be not only insulting, but actually groundless.

It got here for reasons that relate to economic anthropology, not economics itself.

People’s relationship with banks is more nuanced, in which trust between the two communities – bankers and the public – is essential. But when the authorities at the highest level talk about banks as bandits worse than Terente, the signal to people at the level of prime ministers is clear: do not trust banks.

BNR: Financial accessibility in Romania is negatively affected by low trust in financial institutions

The current situation was also contributed to by the Wild West years, when banks fought in more or less transparent ways to gain market share and report as much profit as possible to their parent banks. For executives to earn their annual bonuses. They did it, sometimes at the expense of clients.

These years came with a late but very bitter reckoning for the banks. The trust in the relationship with them suffered a lot.

“Financial access in Romania is still negatively affected by low trust in financial institutions, increasing cash preference and low financial education,” the BNR’s stability report said. By the way, the share of “invisibles” has remained unchanged for the past 10 years.

When the human factor was evacuated

Gillian Tett, chairman of the editorial board of the Financial Times, an anthropologist by profession, attended a meeting of bankers, which she described as follows: “When they got together and talked, these bankers created a network of connections. But they were also inventing a new language that they thought set them apart from everyone else.”

The way they discussed loans emphasized numbers and deliberately excluded any mention of social interaction. In the first two days I was there, they never once mentioned the human debtor at the end of this financing chain. They were also very exclusive. There was a feeling that “only we have this knowledge.”

We have almost 7 million “invisible” people – people who have no relation to banks. According to Global Finance, we are the 12th most unbanked country in the world, next to Kenya and Afghanistan.

Anthropologists will learn how we got here. The authorities and bankers must explain why we stayed here. And futurologists, and perhaps ourselves, to help develop.