Smart Mobility and Capital – How Has the Banking Sector Responded to Green Market Demands?

The role of banks when it comes to implementing the green agenda is to award green project. A green project entails at least 20% of project components being green, so that the bank could finance it. Most banks’ strategies feature the goal of having 30% of all credits in the portfolio be green. It’s not a cheap technology and that is why there’s a subsidized interest, said Vladimir Vasic of the Association of Serbian Banks.

At the Smart Mobility conference, talking about the financing of green projects and the interest of the banking sector in financing such projects, he said that the banking sector had had the green agenda as part of its business policy for 10 years by that point.

– The global energy crisis will further stimulate us to turn to the green agenda and we also saw how things change, especially when it comes to digitization, during the Covid crisis, so we had between a million and 1.2 million users of mobile banking apps then, and the number is now 3.8 million mobile apps in Serbia – Vasic pointed out.

As he added, in order for things to change more substantially, some changes need to happen on the global level too.

– Each state and each city have to have a strategy how to become green. Electric buses make sense, because pollution is reduced, but in international transport, transport by electric vehicles is quite expensive. And that will be a challenge in the future, solving such things – he added.

According to the chairman of the Executive Board of ProCredit Bank, Igor Anic, when it comes to green projects and the implementation of the green agenda, the situation is changing with each year and is increasingly more favorable.

– If we’re talking about the infrastructure, our bank has invested in the network of electric chargers, so 200 chargers have been installed in the Balkans. That is our contribution. In Serbia, we have over 40 chargers that we’ve installed in front of our branch offices and in other places – Anic added.

Considering that ProCredit Bank has switched its entire rolling stock to electric vehicles, the question of cost-effectiveness has come up.

– There are several levels of cost-effectiveness. Financially, I can’t say it’s cost-effective, but we also have to take into consideration the environmental feasibility. Our starting point was that we wanted to change the internal rules. Today, there are state subsidies that support these kinds of investments, and if we take into consideration the fact that, in the coming years, the production of internal-combustion-engine cars will slowly stop, we can say that such investments will pay off – he emphasizes.

Evropska investiciona banka EIB

EBRD Evropska banka za obnovu i razvoj Beograd

Udruženje banaka Srbije

ProCredit Bank a.d. Beograd

Vladimir Vasić

Igor Anić

Smart Mobility conference

digitization in banking

financing of green projects

financing of renewable energy source projects

green loans