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Introduction
Globally, in the past decade, the financial service sector has undergone profound changes as a result of deregulation and the emergence of new technologies (Bachas et al., 2018), an escalation of competition (Paswan et al., 2004; Beckett et al., 2000) and higher costs of developing new products (Akamavi, 2005). Additionally, an internal shift appeared toward overcoming the traditional attitudes of treating consumers of financial services as somewhat passive and inert (Howcroft et al., 2003). Naturally, this brings inevitable challenges to address:
for individuals – how to deal with the fast and easier access to financial services and money, in terms of imposing self-control (SC) and not being caught exclusively in a short-time orientation; and
for service providers – how to accurately and ethically incorporate consumer insights into new financial services.
Both aspects are of particular relevance, from a market structure and a behavioral perspective, in the Romanian economy.
Specifically, the uniqueness of this setting has a two-level nature:
Romania is the second-largest market in the Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) region (after Poland), inheriting a post-communist cultural legacy, common to the entire area, that requires contextualized international marketing strategies by comparison to standard approaches from Western economies (Marinov et al., 2002); and
despite the common legacy, Romania is a distinct space from the Post-Soviet countries: ad literam, Romania is just post-communist and not post-soviet. Effectively, the country was already independent in communist times, thus it had a strong sense of national identity and implicitly a strong repulsion toward Russian influence (Gallagher, 2001).
The communist regime, imposed in 1944 by the Soviet Union, ended violently and abruptly in December 1989, leaving behind a void political and administrative space (Valsan et al., 2015). The tight centralized control and harsh repressions were among the toughest in the CESEE block (next to Bulgaria), the result being a chaotic and more difficult transition than in other cases in the region where the move was either initiated by the regime or the society (Miller et al., 2012). The transition was not only an intricate economic reform process but also a psychological one (Kolodko, 1993), considering the contrast between the previous resource scarcity and the multiple choices and increased instant gratification brought by...