Sergiu Manea is Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Management Board of Banca Comercială Română (BCR), a position he has held since October 2015, when he became the first Romanian chief executive appointed by the bank's majority shareholder, Erste Group. He brings more than two decades of investment and commercial banking experience in global markets. Under his leadership, BCR launched George, Romania's first intelligent banking platform, and founded The Money School, the largest financial education programme in Romania, recognised with a Guinness World Record for the world's largest financial literacy lesson held across multiple venues.

He began his banking career in 1994 and went on to hold trading roles at ING Bank Romania and Citibank Romania, before joining Bank Austria Creditanstalt, where he served as Director and Treasurer of the Romanian operation between 1998 and 2000. From 2000 onwards he held a series of management positions with responsibility for financial markets at ABN AMRO, first as Country Head of Financial Markets in Romania and subsequently in fixed-income trading in London.

Between 2005 and 2010, he was Managing Director and Head of EEMEA Markets at UniCredit Markets & Investment Banking at Bank Austria in Vienna, and from 2010 to 2012 he was Managing Partner at Ithuba Capital, a Vienna-based investment advisory firm. He returned to Romania in 2012 to join BCR's Management Board as Executive Vice-President for Corporates & Markets, overseeing corporate and commercial banking, investment banking, capital markets, transaction banking, trade finance and public infrastructure finance, before his appointment as Chief Executive Officer.

Sergiu Manea graduated from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest in 1995 and holds a Master of Science in Finance from the ASE Doctoral School of Finance (DOFIN) in Bucharest. He serves as Vice-President of the Aspen Institute Romania and has served as President of the Board of Directors of the Council of Banking Employers in Romania (CPBR), a role he held from 2017 to 2020 and again from 2023.