Electronic Promissory Notes to Be Introduced Soon

The digitization of banking services now encompasses promissory notes as well, so they will exist in an electronic form. The plan is for the service to be available as soon as this year. Paper promissory notes will still exist and people will be able to use them and register them through banks, as has been the case so far.

The National Bank of Serbia (NBS) says that there is no intention to cancel the use of paper promissory notes, but to enable electronic promissory notes (e-promissory notes) to be another way in which users can issue and transfer promissory notes for the purpose of the further digitization of the financial services and operations in Serbia. The users who want to use e-promissory notes will be able to get that service from a bank without paying special fees for its activation, and the banks will be obliged to accept e-promissory notes as security instruments, for example, in the case of loans, from those clients who want to use them.

In the Register of Promissory Notes and Authorizations, whose integral part will also be the Central Register of e-Promissory Notes, a total of 8,423,038 promissory notes are registered at the moment, whereby, currently, the register lists only the promissory notes of the legal and natural persons that carry out activities, and doesn’t list the citizen’s promissory notes. The majority of the promissory notes are registered as blank promissory notes, which means that no sum is stated, whereas only 3,700 promissory notes are registered as full promissory notes with a stated sum. When it comes to the registered full promissory notes, a majority of them (3,642) states the sum in dinars.

E-promissory notes will be filled out and used through the special user app (Central Register of e-Promissory Notes), which the users will access through their electronic or mobile banking accounts. The promissory notes will be filled out the same way whether the issuer is a citizen or a company.

When the issuer repays the debt based on which the e-promissory note has been issued, they will be able to ask their creditor to request the deletion of that e-promissory note in the app. The creditor will be able to accept the request and have the e-promissory note deleted without having to pay any fee. In addition to that, the creditor will be able to delete the e-promissory note based on which the debt was repaid even without the issuer’s request, for free. If the creditor does not delete the e-promissory note based on which the debt was repaid, the issuer will be able, as has been the case so far, to request the cancelation of the promissory note in a court procedure, and the NBS, once it gets a valid court decision on the cancelation of the e-promissory note, will automatically delete such an e-promissory note.

Debt repayment will be accelerated, because the creditor will be able to electronically submit the payment order to the bank of the issuer by using the app (so, without having to physically go to the bank), and the issuer’s bank will have the obligation of responding to that order within the proscribed, relatively short, deadline, with the note showing whether the payment order has been accepted, and if so, whether it has been repaid from the account of the issuer at that bank or the order for enforced payment has been sent to the NBS. Upon receiving the order for enforced payment, which the bank submits to the central bank, the blocking of all the accounts of the issuer and the enforced payment will be carried out efficiently and quickly, as before.

Within their account in the app, the issuer will have an overview of the state of their account, that is, the status of all the e-promissory notes they have issued, which includes the data on the creditor who currently has a certain e-promissory note, the data on how the user has filled out or added data on the e-promissory note which weren’t filled out during its registration and the first transfer, or the data about the order for enforced payment based on a certain e-promissory note having been sent.

Narodna banka Srbije Beograd

National Bank of Serbia

NBS

electronic promissory notes

e promissory notes

blank promissory notes

Central Register of e Promissory Notes