Let's start with the fact that the fashionable word in Russia, acquiring, has not taken root in the financial life of Serbia. Here it is customary to call this payment option "e-commerce", you can also find the English expression "payment gateway".
The beginning of the development of online trading dates back to 1999, when Astra Bank (no longer exists) was the first bank in Serbia to introduce a system for authorizing transactions via the Internet, but soon after, in 2001, it stopped providing this service.
The next attempt was more successful, and it happened in 2007, when Banca Intesa connected its first trader – the telecommunications giant Telenor, but even after that there was no breakthrough and the number of client companies of the new service grew to one hundred only after several years.
Just 7 years later, some other banks began to provide e-commerce services to their clients.
At the moment, according to our information, the acquiring service is supported by:
Unicredit
AIC
NLB and Komercialna Banka (the first one bought the second bank)
Raiffeisen
OTP
Procredit bank
Halbank
Intesa
The latter are the market leader in this service in Serbia.
An important stimulus for development was the important amendments to the law on electronic commerce ( zakon o elektronskoj trgovini ), which establishes that information services to support online commerce are not limited by licenses or special permits (not to be confused with the sale of the goods themselves, when there are exceptions).
Now let's move on to the current needs of investors who are opening businesses in Serbia. As can be seen from the list of banks that support acquiring, perhaps only in Raiffeisen does a businessman with a foreign passport have a chance to open a business account, and even then, a very small one. In this case, the only option left is to contact intermediary payment companies, but even here, not everything is so smooth.
Foreign well-known payment systems such as PayPal, Payoneer do not work with dinars, which means that it is impossible to receive money to a Serbian business account for services rendered in Serbia, and some local systems (for example https://www.wspay.rs/ and https://www.allsecure.rs/ ) work only with legal entities that have accounts in the above-mentioned eight banks.
At the time of writing this article, only the https://chipcard.rs/ service (operating under the license of the global Payten system) confirmed the possibility of cooperation on the e-commerce service without conditions for specific banks, but again, if two conditions are met:
availability of a RSD business account in any bank in Serbia
passing verification by the National Bank of Serbia (NBS)
To verify, fill out the NBS questionnaire, and receive a response within a few working days. Chipcard fees range from 1.8% to 3.5% of the transaction, depending on the type of card (the lowest for DINA cards and the highest for cards of foreign payment systems issued outside Serbia).
We will be happy to share new details about the acquiring launch with you as soon as we go through the entire procedure ourselves. So keep an eye on our telegram channel and website .
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