EBRD opens €25m dinar factoring line as Serbia’s receivables market scales

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has provided UniCredit Serbia with a €25m-equivalent revolving factoring facility in Serbian dinars, giving the bank additional local-currency funding for domestic receivables finance.

The facility has been made available through the EBRD’s Trade Facilitation Programme and will be used to support UniCredit’s factoring activities across Serbian businesses in a range of sectors. It represents the first disbursement in Serbian dinars under the EBRD’s factoring facility with UniCredit Serbia.

Local-currency funding is important because factoring normally converts a company’s domestic receivables into immediate liquidity. Financing those assets in dinars can reduce the currency mismatch that would arise if a business earning and paying most of its costs in Serbian dinars were effectively funded through foreign-currency liquidity.

The EBRD has not disclosed pricing, individual transaction maturity, advance rates, recourse terms or the eligibility criteria UniCredit will apply to invoices financed through the programme.

The transaction comes as Serbia’s factoring market is expanding rapidly. BCR’s latest available country-market data show total factoring turnover reached €2.30bn in 2024, up 25% year on year, with domestic transactions accounting for 97% of activity. Non-recourse domestic factoring almost doubled to €433m, while recourse domestic factoring grew 45%.

Reverse factoring remained the largest domestic product, accounting for around half of total turnover despite growing more slowly than other segments.

Against that backdrop, the new EBRD facility adds wholesale funding capacity to a market where local receivables products are already becoming a larger source of business liquidity.

The structure also illustrates how a multilateral trade-finance programme can support domestic rather than exclusively cross-border trade. EBRD capital sits behind UniCredit Serbia, which can then recycle that liquidity through revolving purchases or financing of invoices generated by Serbian businesses.

For companies, the commercial effect is more immediate access to cash tied up in customer payment terms. For UniCredit, the facility provides another source of funding for an expanding factoring portfolio without requiring each underlying corporate borrower to access the international capital markets itself.