Safe Path for Online Purchases in Serbia – NBS to remove obstacles to online payments

Electronic commerce should become a part of everyday life in Serbia as well, Governor of the National Bank of Serbia Jorgovanka Tabakovic said at the conference E-Commerce in Serbia – a Safe Path for Online Purchases, the NBS said in its press release.

– The NBS has been recently investing efforts to eliminate one of the greatest obstacles – the interchange fees, which are the main generator of high merchant fees in card-based payments. We are also working intensively to introduce the instant payment system and will soon announce another legal arrangement facilitating faster and simpler bank switching and higher transparency of fees – Tabakovic said.

She said that “our joint objective is to ensure that service users have a greater choice, better profiled services and lower prices, that merchants have access to a larger market and that banks become more productive at lower transaction costs and with enhanced operational capacity. We also wish to ensure that financial services are more inclusive and people better informed when making financial decisions”.

Participants in the Conference, organized in cooperation with payment service providers enabling online card payments in Serbia, highlighted the importance of safe and secure online card payments, and the significance of continuous education of citizens in this field.

During panel discussions, representatives of the NBS, enterprises, banks, IT lawyers and e-commerce experts shared their experiences and exchanged opinions about the place of e-commerce in business strategies of Serbian banks, and about the reasons why the public still perceives this service as expensive and inaccessible. They also elaborated on whether the focus should be placed on large merchants only or whether the potential in fact lies with small merchants.

Participants also touched upon the launching, implementation and development of e-commerce in Serbia, with an emphasis both on domestic and foreign markets, the ways in which panel participants resolved the issues of electronic contract conclusion, payments and collections, imports, exports, goods delivery, advertising of their products, tax calculation, provision of support to users, resolving complaints.

A focus was also placed on the importance of e-commerce in Serbia, both for large systems and all those who aspire to become large, the perception of internet entrepreneurs in relation to the e-commerce service of commercial banks and the NBS as the regulator, how to use PayPal, and alternative payment methods (cryptocurrencies).

Narodna banka Srbije Beograd

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