The National Bank of Serbia has found a solution to the significant problem of repaying loans in Swiss francs, which clients are increasingly struggling to pay off.
The bank has been considering various models for the past two months, and according to the B92 portal, it will present the details of the selected model in the next ten days.
Namely, five banks that have approved the most loans in popular ‘Swiss francs’ will offer their clients the option to extend the repayment period by up to 10 years, which would significantly reduce the monthly installment but also increase the total value of the loan taken out.
Another model being considered is to return the entire loan to a ‘zero level’ and share the cost of growth between clients and banks.
In this case, bankers would reduce the loan repayment by a specified amount, and the exchange rate would be fixed at a certain level for future installments. This option is similar to the Hungarian model, and the National Bank should offer a term during which the exchange rate would be ‘frozen’.
In practice, this would mean that the difference between the initially agreed installment and today’s amount would be split in half, to be borne by the client and the bank.
The portal notes that a loan taken out five years ago for 63 thousand euros now amounts to 72 thousand, raising questions about how the situation will develop further. Serbian economists consider these solutions merely a short-term lifeline, as they mainly pertain to housing loans with terms of 20 to 30 years, and emphasize that it is difficult to predict exchange rate movements over such a long period.
