All banks operating in Serbia and the Belgrade Stock Exchange are members of the Association of Serbian Banks. The aim of the Association is to position and strengthen the reputation of the banking sector, both in Serbia and abroad. Since its founding in 1921, the Association of Serbian Banks has been representing, protecting and promoting the activities of its members and coordinating banking practices by means of implementing general rules and principles of professional work and good business practices. In particular, the Association performs the following operations:
In line with banking trends, the Association of Serbian Banks offers a set of services that significantly facilitate the banks’ operations and accelerate their development. These include, among others, providing assistance for the banks in the field of risk management, harmonising with the international standards defined by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, implementing international accounting standards and the compliance function, etc.
Within the ASB, the following separate organizational units were formed:
The ASB Credit Bureau as a national-level institution for monitoring of and supervision over credit exposure of individuals and legal entities – clients of banks and other institutions, ranks among the most successful and most efficient in the world, with the tendency of constant improvement and extension of its scope of services.
Its members are all banks, leasing companies, all mobile network operators, all government funds and agencies, insurance companies and other institutions. The counters of the Credit Bureau are all banks’ counters, about 2000 of them, all over Serbia.
The operations of the Bank Clearing Institution are based on the state-of-the-art equipment and software, guaranteeing the settlement of transactions within the shortest possible time framework, in a reliable and professional manner. For this project the Association of Serbian Banks won the European Banking Technology Award in November 2005 in London. This project enabled the settlement of cheques from all banks operating in the country to be reduced from 12 days to less than an hour.
The ASB Bank Training Centre organizes professional training for employees in the field of banking and finance, symposia, seminars, roundtables and bank apprentice exams.
The members of the Association of Serbian Banks are all banks operating in Serbia. The ASB is a member of the European Banking Federation (EBF), European Bank Training Network (EBTN), Banking Association for Central and Eastern Europe (BACEE), International Coordinating Council of Banking Associations in CIS, Central and Eastern Europe (International Banking Council –IBC), InterBalkan Forum of Bank Associations, and Commission on Banking Technology and Practice of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), as well as the Sustainable Banking Network (SBN). The ASB has an intense cooperation with numerous foreign institutions, banking associations, banks and the International Chamber of Commerce.
Gathering the representatives of banks and the Association, there are 14 active ASB expert committees for: risk and capital management; foreign operations; retail operations; financial markets development; legal operations; accounting; taxation system; compliance function; digital banking; information technologies; payment system; education and HR; marketing and PR; security.