🇷🇸 Payments in the Balkans

The landscape: 11 markets, five monetary regimes

Southeast Europe comprises 11 payment markets spread across five monetary regimes. “Balkans” is a geographic and historical term; it does not correspond to any shared payment infrastructure. Greece and Slovenia have long been in the euro area; Croatia joined on January 1, 2023, and Bulgaria on January 1, 2026. Montenegro and Kosovo use the euro unilaterally, with no seat on the ECB Governing Council and no direct access to Eurosystem facilities. Serbia, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Albania keep their national currencies. A firm collecting payments in several of these countries therefore juggles currencies, settlement rails, and regulatory timelines that do not line up. EU rules apply automatically only in EU member states. The other countries access the same schemes through contractual membership.

Serbia: a central bank that runs the whole chain

Narodna banka Srbije (NBS), Serbia's central bank, is both the supervisor and the operator of the country's payment infrastructure. It directly runs the RTGS, retail clearing, the instant rail, the national card scheme, and a foreign-currency clearing system with two neighboring countries. Four payment systems and a card scheme thus sit with a single operator. Elsewhere in Europe, these functions are split among a bank-owned consortium, a private processor, and a clearing house. Fees, limits, and access rules are published by the central bank itself, so negotiations with a Serbian acquirer cover only the acquirer's own service margin.

• RTGS NBS, real-time gross settlement in dinars. Any transfer above RSD 300,000 must go through it, between 09:00 and 18:00 on business days. It is the finality layer for the entire system.
• Kliring NBS, multilateral clearing of transfers up to RSD 300,000, with four netting cycles a day (10:30, 12:30, 14:30, and 17:00), which then settle in the RTGS.
• IPS NBS, the instant rail live since October 22, 2018, 24/7/365, with a limit of RSD 300,000 per payment order and automatic rejection if funds are insufficient at execution.
• DinaCard, the national card scheme since 2003, operated by the NBS and co-badgeable with UnionPay International and Discover.
• Međunarodni kliring u devizama, euro clearing among Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin participants, based on bilateral agreements between central banks.

The RSD 300,000 threshold determines how a Serbian transfer is routed among the three systems. Above it, the RTGS is mandatory and the central bank's operating hours apply. Below it, the originator chooses between deferred clearing in cycles and the 24/7 instant rail. Splitting a payment into several orders below the threshold makes funds available outside RTGS hours. But it also multiplies the entries tied to a single invoice, which weakens the audit trail. This parameter matters when configuring a supplier payment engine, a payroll schedule, or marketplace payouts.

Serbia's QR code: IPS pokaži, IPS skeniraj, and 0.2% interchange

In 2020, the NBS added a merchant QR standard to IPS, with two mirror-image modes. In IPS pokaži (“IPS show”), the merchant displays the code on a checkout screen, a sticker, or a printed invoice. In IPS skeniraj (“IPS scan”), the reverse applies: the customer displays their code and the merchant scans it. The second mode suits checkout lines and mobile terminals; the first requires no hardware at all. A Serbian micro-merchant can thus accept an instant credit transfer with a laminated sticker and a bank account, with no terminal, no card acquiring agreement, and no equipment to maintain.

In Serbia, offering instant payments at the point of sale is a regulatory requirement. Since April 1, 2019, every Serbian provider that issues or accepts cards for domestic point-of-sale payments must also offer the equivalent instrument for instant payment requests (NBS). The obligation falls on the provider, not the merchant, which remains free to accept the instrument or not. On this point, the Serbian model differs from the Greek approach described below. Serbia's legal framework has also been brought closer to PSD2: the law amending the Serbian Law on Payment Services, adopted on July 31, 2024, has applied since May 6, 2025 (Karanović & Partners, 2025).

Croatia: what the euro switched off, and what it left standing

Croatia's adoption of the euro on January 1, 2023 changed the country's payment infrastructure well beyond the unit of account. It shut down entire systems. The national RTGS, HSVP, in service since 1999, gave way to TARGET. The irrevocable conversion rate was set at €1 = HRK 7.53450. Kuna coins could be exchanged until December 31, 2025; banknotes remain exchangeable at the HNB indefinitely. The change therefore hit the settlement rails, while displayed amounts were simply converted at the irrevocable rate. Any Croatian documentation from before 2023 describes infrastructure that no longer exists.

The euro changeover left the usage layer intact, meaning the apps through which payments are initiated. Croatia has no domestic card scheme, but every merchant knows two apps. KEKS Pay, launched in 2018 by Erste&Steiermärkische Bank, is open to customers of all banks. It handles P2P transfers by phone number, merchant QR payments, and bill splitting. Aircash, an e-money institution founded in Zagreb in 2015, has outgrown its home market to become a regional super app. It covers bills, bus and ferry tickets, parking, road vignettes, tolls, and gift cards, with a linked Mastercard card. Aircash is one of the few players in the region whose business extends beyond its national borders.

Greece: IRIS, or instant payment acceptance mandated by the tax authority

IRIS is Greece's alias-based instant rail, operated by DIAS Interbanking Systems since 2018 and built on the SCT Inst scheme. Greece has made accepting instant payments a tax obligation, backed by penalties and applicable to every business. No other European country has made such acceptance mandatory. Payments are treated there more as a tax-collection tool than as a competitive financial service. Every transaction accepted through IRIS is linked to the cash register, and therefore to reported revenue. The service owes its spread to this regulatory requirement rather than to the appeal of the customer experience.

Since June 30, 2026, IRIS has supported transfers beyond Greece's borders. DIAS has connected the service to EuroPA, the alliance linking national account-to-account payment solutions. The network brings together Bizum in Spain, MB Way in Portugal, and Bancomat Pay in Italy; Vipps MobilePay joined in May 2025, and BLIK has signed a letter of intent. The first phase covers only person-to-person transfers by phone number, on SCT Inst rails, across five countries and about 57.3 million people at launch (DIAS, 2026). Extension to merchant payments, online and in store, is announced for 2027. Cross-border collection through IRIS will therefore only become possible in that second phase.

Romania and Bulgaria: ramburs on one side, the euro on the other

Romania and Bulgaria are two EU member states that came late to card payments, and their cash shares are among the highest in the EU. Their paths diverged on January 1, 2026, when Bulgaria became the 21st member of the euro area. Romania maintains two parallel rails, one in lei and one in euros. All of Romania's infrastructure is run by TRANSFOND S.A., a company owned by the Banca Națională a României (National Bank of Romania) and the commercial banks. It operates three systems: ReGIS (the leu RTGS, 2005), SENT (bulk clearing in RON and EUR, 2005), and Plăți instant (instant payments in lei since 2019, under 10 seconds, 24/7/365). On top of these, RoPay has added a national payment initiation layer since 2025. It accepts QR codes, deep links, NFC, and phone numbers in place of the IBAN.

In Romania, ramburs means cash on delivery, which remains the dominant payment method in e-commerce. It shapes online payment collection in Romania more than the transfer infrastructure described above. The trade association ARMO puts the share of orders paid this way in 2025 at 60 to 65%. Estimates vary widely by method and scope, but none is anywhere near as low as elsewhere in the EU. The effects of ramburs are primarily logistical. An order refused at the door becomes a shipping cost, and returns are paid for twice. Working capital must then be sized on collections that have not yet happened.

Western Balkans: TIPS Clone and step-by-step entry into SEPA

The Western Balkans comprise five markets outside the EU (Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Albania) plus Kosovo. None is big enough to recoup the cost of a modern instant payment infrastructure on its own, and none matches the domestic volume of a mid-sized EU member state. The answer has been regional. On January 10, 2025, in Rome, the Western Balkan central banks signed an agreement to create a cross-border instant payment system, with a commitment to go live within 18 months. The platform, developed by the Banca d'Italia with support from the ECB and the Eurosystem, reuses the technology of TARGET Instant Payment Settlement. It is called TIPS Clone.

TIPS Clone is built on dual settlement: it processes payments in two currencies and in two forms of money. The platform settles national currencies in central bank money and euros in commercial bank money. A country that keeps the denar or the convertible mark can therefore offer domestic instant payments without giving up monetary sovereignty, while the connection also lays the groundwork for interoperability with the euro area. The EU allocated €2 million to develop the project and fund its first year of maintenance (CBBH, 2026). For a euro area central bank, the arrangement amounts to exporting its infrastructure without exporting its currency.

Collecting payments in the region: what breaks and what it costs

Four configuration mistakes keep recurring among merchants who approach the region with a single setup. The first is treating it as a uniform market because it is geographically compact. The second is thinking in card terms, when three countries rolled out instant credit transfers at the point of sale before card acceptance became universal. The third is overlooking domestic schemes, which are invisible from abroad yet sit in customers' wallets. The fourth is an accounting mistake: assuming a single credit cycle, when instant payments settle in seconds while card clearing still runs on national cycles.

• Currencies: five regimes coexist. A single entity collecting in RSD, RON, BAM, MKD, ALL, and EUR carries FX risk that does not exist in a euro area market.
• Instant payments: irrevocable, with no chargebacks and no deferred capture. That is a cash-flow advantage and a dispute-handling drawback. Refunds go back to being a commercial process rather than a scheme mechanism.
• Interchange: Serbia applies 0.2% to instant payments at the point of sale, paid by the acquirer to the issuer (NBS). The notion that a public rail is inherently free does not survive a look at the fee schedule.
• Aliases: IRIS, blink P2P, RoPay, KEKS Pay, and Flik all rely on a national directory of phone-number proxies. A customer who switches mobile operator or bank breaks the link, so plan for refreshing payee data.
• Acquiring: entry points are local. NETOPIA Payments in Romania, BORICA in Bulgaria, DIAS and Cardlink in Greece, Fina in Croatia, the NBS in Serbia. No international acquirer covers the whole region directly.
• Seasonality: on the Croatian, Montenegrin, Albanian, and Greek coasts, summer concentrates volume. Sizing support, terminals, and cash flow on the annual average leads to a breakdown in July.