28/09/2026
Ladies and gentlemen,
distinguished representatives of insurance companies and banks, dear colleagues,
I shall begin my address with these verses:
In whose hands are the cards?
Without the consent of the one who decides everything,
nothing can be resolved.
Both the one who must sell
and the one who must buy
will wither away, leaving only dishonour,
guilt, remorse and revenge.
Which came first?
Which lasts longer, and which bites more fiercely?
One looks towards the light,
the other sees only its gleam.
One makes the offer, buying with sins;
the other accepts.
The latter cannot choose and has no choice:
the cards are in someone else’s hands.
Yet nothing can ever seal the fissure
in their dark depths.
Light cannot reach a man
who refuses to yield to it.
Blinded, they see no other path,
darkness and their hunger lead them,
and man follows his own nature.
At first glance, what man desires
but has yet to attain
seems immense, however small it may be.
Once his desire is fulfilled and he obtains it,
new desires emerge from the darkness
and his hunger grows ever greater.
When one sells and the other buys,
the cards will be dealt again,
but everything will have become worthless.
Cheap desires, cheaper people still,
only insatiable hunger grows
and awakens the beast within.
Both the one who must sell
and the one who must buy
will wither away, leaving only dishonour,
guilt, remorse and revenge.
Which came first?
Which lasts longer, and which bites more fiercely?
In the context of this conference, its trends and forecasts, I want none of us sitting in this hall to bear the mark of either dishonour or a desire for revenge, but rather the pride that comes from the legacy we leave behind.
And so, distinguished guests, I shall begin my address today with a question that is far older than either insurance or banking.
What is the future? Is it simply what will happen to us? Or is the future something that, thanks to our knowledge and experience, we can anticipate with sufficient clarity today? Banks and insurance companies have far more in common than may appear at first glance. One manages money. The other manages risk. One lends money to the future. The other buys certainty from the future. And ultimately, both deal in the same thing: TRUST.
A person who entrusts their money to a bank believes that it will be available when they need it. A person who pays for insurance believes that, when something they hoped would never happen does happen, someone will stand by them.
So, behind balance sheets, premiums, interest rates, capital, provisions and all our complicated tables lies something very simple: the words “I trust”.
And trust may well be the oldest financial institution in the world. Our ancestors did not have the Basel standards, Solvency II, stress tests, AI models or big data.
They had fields, livestock, houses and one very useful proverb: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Today, we might translate that same wisdom into the language of the financial sector, only it would sound rather different: diversification, risk management, capital adequacy, system resilience… A wise and cautious person would sum it up in one simple sentence: “Never keep everything of value in one place”.
But 2026 brings a new reality. The problem is not merely that the world is changing. The problem is that it is changing faster than we can adjust to the previous change. Just as we begin to understand one technology, another emerges. Just as we adapt our business model, customer behaviour changes. Just as we establish a new form of protection, a new risk emerges. Just as we learn how to use artificial intelligence, we must also learn how to live with the consequences of its use.
That is why it is no longer enough to ask: “What will change?” Change is certain. The real question is: “How quickly can we understand that change?”
And this is where banks and insurers meet once again. For both banking and insurance rest upon an almost philosophical discipline: making decisions under conditions of INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE.
A banker can never know for certain what will happen to a client. An insurer can never know exactly when a risk will materialize. Yet both have to make a decision. Not tomorrow. Today.
They make it based on the information they have, the experience they’ve gained, and their assessment of what they still cannot know. Perhaps this is the most beautiful definition of business wisdom: You don’t have to know everything, just enough to make a good decision.
There is a saying: “The early bird catches the worm.” Today, perhaps it should be: “The early bird doesn’t have to scramble.” Because once a change becomes obvious to everyone, it is no longer an advantage. The advantage lies in spotting it while it is still just a faint signal.
While others say, “It’s just a passing phase.” While the market says, “We’ll see.” While the organisation says, “Let’s wait a little longer.” And then, one morning, we wake up and realise: The trend is no longer a trend. It has become reality.
That is why perhaps the most important trends in 2026 are precisely those that are changing the way we make decisions. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we process information. Digitalisation is changing the way we communicate with clients.
Changes in consumer behaviour are reshaping what clients expect from banks and insurers. New risks are changing the way we assess them. And the ever-growing volume of information is, paradoxically, creating a new problem for us:
How do we distinguish information from knowledge?
Because having a million pieces of data is not the same as understanding what they mean. A computer can tell us what happened. Analytics can show us what might happen. But someone still has to decide: “What are we going to do now?” That is where technology stops being a matter of technique and becomes a matter of responsibility.
And here I would make one more small distinction between the past and the future. There was a time when the greatest advantage was information. Whoever knew more, knew more. Today, almost everyone has access to information. That is why the ability to sift through vast amounts of information and identify what is important will become increasingly valuable. In other words: The future will not belong to those who have the most data, but to those who know how to draw the right meaning from it.
But there is something no algorithm can ever guarantee us: trust. We can automate a process. We can digitalise a service. We can speed up a decision. We can personalise an offer.
But once a person loses trust, no algorithm can make that trust whole again. That is why perhaps the greatest luxury of the future will be something that was once completely ordinary: A PERSON we trust. And that is why I am so pleased to see representatives of banks and insurance companies gathered here today. Because this very cooperation reflects one of the important messages of our time: financial institutions are no longer islands. Clients do not see them through the lens of our organisational schemes. They do not think, “Now I am a user of a banking product, and seven minutes from now I will become a user of an insurance product.”
They see one single life – their own. One home. One car. One family. One job. One investment. One future. And they expect the system around them to be as connected as their life is. Perhaps that is one of the greatest challenges we face: to stop thinking only about products and start thinking more about the person we are offering them to.
Because, in the end, a bank does not simply sell a loan. An insurance company does not simply sell a policy. Banks give people the opportunity to achieve something today that they might otherwise have to wait years for. Insurers give them the ability to preserve, despite an unforeseen event, what they have spent years building. One helps people build their future. The other helps them protect it. And in between, there is a person simply trying to live their life. Perhaps that is precisely our shared responsibility.
That is why I would not want us to try to predict the future today. Because, if we are honest, the future has never been particularly cooperative when we have tried to predict it. It asks us to understand it. To ask: What is coming? What is already happening, but we have not yet taken seriously enough? What risks are still ahead? What opportunities have we yet to see?
And perhaps most importantly: What will we do differently when we leave this room?
Because there is one sentence I would like us to leave behind today, if not forget it altogether: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” How many times have you heard those words? It may be the most expensive sentence in business. Because the past is an excellent teacher. But it is a very poor strategist for the future.
History teaches us that wisdom begins with acknowledging that we do not know everything. Our industry teaches us something similar every day. We cannot know every risk. We cannot predict every event. We cannot control every change. But we can be better prepared. We can listen. We can learn. We can change what no longer works. And we can build something that no trend can ever make obsolete or take away its value:
Trust.
So I would ask all of you: If the future is uncertain, then what can we be certain of? Perhaps the answer is simple: We cannot be certain about what will happen.
But our job is to be prepared. Banks to support what people want to build. Insurers to protect what people do not want to lose. And together, to make sure that the uncertainty of the future is not a reason for fear, but an opportunity to make responsible decisions. And that, in my view, is much more than any business agenda.
That is a serious responsibility to society. So let us not try to predict the future today. Let us be among those who are the first to understand it and ready to meet it. Let us not be the ones who merely react to what is already upon us, but be prepared for whatever lies ahead, all those things that, as our elders used to say, are “rolling in from beyond the hills,” with the distant drums already announcing their arrival.
I would just like to add two or three sentences to tell you what we have done, alongside all this, to turn the key trends I have been talking about – and the message of trust and faith in people that I have repeated three times – into something real. And please forgive me for repeating myself, but a financial system is not built only in good years. It is also built for the years when times are hard – and we have seen such years before.
When I came to the helm of the NBS in August 2012, I found double-digit inflation and a dinar that had lost 33.2% of its value in just four years, while EUR 5.7 bn had been spent defending it. As much as EUR 5.7 bn had been spent from the NBS FX reserves to defend that exchange rate, and yet the dinar was not defended. One in five loans was non-performing, and with such a burden it was difficult to finance new production.
And that is why the real question for us, as regulator and supervisor, and for banks and insurance companies, but also for each of us individually, is not only whether the system is stable today, but whether it will remain stable even when circumstances change that we cannot yet fully predict today.
It is precisely in the answer to that question that I see the essence of what we today call resilience. Because stability is not the absence of risk; stability is the ability to recognise risk, measure it, accept it when it is justified, and contain it when it becomes dangerous. Resilience is also the ability to remain strong after every challenge, to function, to finance the economy, to protect citizens, and to look beyond the current trend and the current crisis. Stability is what we have built, and resilience is what we must now preserve. That is why stability and resilience are not the same, but they have one thing in common – there are no final victories.
Today we can rightly say that the Serbian banking sector is stable, well-capitalised and highly liquid. The banking sector’s assets reached RSD 7,353 bn at the end of July 2026. Lending activity is on the rise, asset quality is improving, the share of NPLs is at a historically lowest level of 1.98%, and for housing loans that indicator is below 1%. The capital adequacy ratio of over 20% at the end of June 2026 indicates that the banking sector has the capital space to absorb losses. There is no need to even speak of strong liquidity, which is twice as high as the prescribed regulatory minimums. The LCR is 199.14%. And all these are important numbers.
But there is one type of capital that is not visible in any of the balance sheets, and yet it is what everything rests on. That is trust. And it is not created by one good quarter, it is not created by one decision, nor can it be prescribed by law. We cannot buy it. It is built over years, and can be lost in a single day. That is why together we must preserve the earned trust of citizens, the economy and investors that the institutions, each of us, will be there when they are most needed.
And that is exactly where we come to the insurance sector, which is not an expense. It is safety infrastructure.
We often view insurance through premium, claims, policy, liquidity, solvency. And all these are important categories. But if we view insurance only through numbers, we have missed its most important economic function. Insurance is an economy of trust. It enables a person to plan for the future even though they know the future cannot be controlled. It enables the economy to invest even though it knows that investment carries risk. It enables a bank to lend because it knows that part of the risk can be transferred. And that is why insurance is not just the business of taking on risk. Insurance companies are an institutionalised shield that takes away the power of risk to destroy what we have been building for years. That is the deeper economic value.
Over the previous fourteen years, total premium increased from RSD 61.5 to 191.5 bn, total assets from RSD 140.5 to 455.7 bn, capital from RSD 35.6 to 98.3 bn, the share of premium in GDP rose to 1.8 %, settled claims from RSD 27 to 96.9 bn, and that trend continues.
This tells us something important: insurance records not only market growth, but growth in society’s ability to bear risk. These are results that deserve respect. But they also carry an obligation. Because the larger the sector, the greater its responsibility. As the number of households and corporates trusting the sector increases, so does the price of any irresponsible action. Therefore, today I would especially emphasize: the greatest risk for insurance is not only the risk contained in the policy. The greatest risk is the loss of trust in the institution of insurance itself. That is why it is important to understand that regulation is not an obstacle to development. Good regulation is the foundation of trust and healthy development.
It does not prevent innovation. It prevents innovation from becoming an excuse for irresponsibility. We do not want to prevent new trends, nor to prevent risks from arising, but we must not allow ourselves to ignore them. Trends are also present in the field of so-called artificial intelligence, digitalisation, climate change, geopolitical circumstances, the energy market, new business models, new user expectations, but one thing is not new. The most dangerous risk is the one we are convinced cannot happen to us. That is why the NBS is neither a brake nor an observer of change, but a guardian and guarantor of the financial order.
You are all already well acquainted with the new regulatory framework – the Draft Law on Credit Institutions, the Draft Law on Insurance, the Draft Law on Financial Conglomerates... The essence of these laws is not in their names; the essence is that rules must follow both development and risk, and not that risk outpaces rules. Our goal is not to be formally harmonised with the European Union. Our goal is to turn standards into domestic strength and capability, to better protect users, to strengthen institutions, to enable innovation, but above all to be certain that the price of innovation is never paid by a loss of trust.
I would like to conclude this presentation of mine with a sentence that is both a plea and a demand, and we will also implement it through the supervision for which we are responsible.
Let us be the ones who will make it possible for the future to have a sustainable system worthy of trust.
And I believe that we, as the financial sector in all its forms, with the support of a highly active and proactive Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia, will respond to all the challenges ahead of us, never forgetting that we do everything for people and with people.
Thank you for your attention.
Governor’s office
