Our Senior Associate Miloš Petaković took part in a round table on the Status of Banking and Finance in the CEE Region recently organized by the preeminent regional legal publication CEE Legal Matters, joined by colleagues from eminent law firms throughout the region.
Miloš drew from his substantial experience in the sector and explained the current situation in Serbia with the industry’s numerous changes. Among other things, Miloš said: “Serbia is in a similar situation to most of the (CEE) markets – the majority of banks are EU-based and are part of the bigger EU banking groups. Still, we do have banks present in the market that come from outside of the EU, in addition to strictly domestic ones.
Currently, 22 banks are operating in Serbia – a drop from the 34 present in the market in 2009. While smaller banks were mainly bought out, we have also seen significant mergers – for example, Eurobank merging with Direktna Banka and NLB merging with Komercijalna Banka. As in Hungary and Croatia, Sberbank was acquired by one of the strongest domestic banks, AIK, and Raiffeisen acquired Credit Agricole. There aren’t any announcements of future significant mergers, but we do see a trend, and we expect it to continue – 22 banks is a bit of a high number for the size of the Serbian market. The statistics show that the sector is stable, at least for the first half of 2022. All the trends that existed before the inflation crisis began are continuing, for example, an evident consolidation trend. Looking at the back half of 2022, however, we still have to wait a bit to check on developments.”
To read the entire article, please follow this link: The Status of the Banking Sector in Serbia
If you would like to listen to a podcast edition stemming from the discussion, please follow this link on Spotify.
