THE CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ROMANIAN BANKING SYSTEM

For the Romanian banking system, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) concept is not a new one, but its importance raises more and more awareness lately, the financial crisis of 2008 significantly bringing to surface the need to integrate the moral principles in the banking activity. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes into account the strategies that help companies to run their business in an ethical way, when talking about the relations to the other members of the society. The CSR can include a wide range of partnerships with the local communities, investments with a real social impact of the corporations (education, art, and environmental protection), developing relations between the firms and their clients, employees and their families. On one hand, the research aims at measuring the level of knowledge of the information regarding the corporate social responsibility of the banks in Romania in the timeframe 2015–2017 and on the other hand, to identify the possible relations between the CSR indexes and the financial performance, seen through the return on assets indicators (ROA) and return on equity indicators (ROE). In order to accomplish these objectives, the research methodology was based on the content analysis method, in order to identify the categories of corporate social responsibility that are included in the CSR index, obtained from the annual reports of the sustainability, published by the analyzed banks. To test the correlations of the dependent and independent variables, there were used correlation techniques and regression of the analyzed data, using the SPSS soft. Even with its limitations, this research can be a very strong source of information and reflection for the decision makers in the Romanian banking sector and more than that, can encourage an even bigger transparency of the information regarding the social and environment responsibility, as well as emphasizing of a performing management under all aspects that are related to the corporate social responsibility