European Consulting Groups, in cooperation with our long-term partners Serbian Association of Managers and Serbian Association of Business Women, organized a policy workshop dedicated to analysis of new financial institutions that would support the growth of MSMEs in Serbia, as foundation for their increased share in the local job market and economy.

The Workshop gathered representatives of local and international banks, international donor organizations, expert society and professional associations, striving to pinpoint the bottlenecks for MSME sector development, support programmes for family and small bussiness, and new channels of funding that could be implemented as seen in similar economies regionally and worldwide.

Topics sucs as non-banking finance institutions, credit unions, banking products, IFIs and access and cost of credit and capital absorption capacity were explored and discussed at great length. Key note speaker, Mr. Gattini Luca of the European Investment Bank, presented the research of EIB regarding the current financial market in the countries of the region and Serbia in particular. Following this, other speakers announced the potential for creating the Development Bank of Serbia, where the positive example of the German KFW was mentioned, the results of the survery about citizens’ attitude toward entrepreneurship, lack of financing and the problems in the financial ecosystem, credit union options etc.

At the end of the Workshop Mr. Pantic presented the plan to establish a Working group that would further analyse these problems and deal in detail with these topics further, which would be further presented to the relevant government bodies in charge of SME development and related financial support.