ZAGREB, 28 April 2022 - Visa on Thursday presented Digital Croatia, a project supporting SMEs and trade businesses with the aim of increasing card payments between them.

Visa's Croatian director Renata Vujasinović said the wish was to help small Croatian businesses in the recovery process. Digital Croatia, she added, is part of Visa's efforts at European level for more than eight million SMEs.

In Croatia, Visa's goal is to increase card payments by 25%, she said.

The main goal of Digital Croatia is to step up the development of a digital payment network, so for six months Visa will offer free POS terminals to Croatian SMEs and trade businesses which did not accept card payments until now, she added.

The project will be carried out over the next three years.

Robert Blažinović of the Economy Ministry said that during the COVID crisis Croatian businesses adopted new digital technologies and business models en masse, adding that Digital Croatia would help them switch to a more modern way of doing business.

He said the ministry would advertise a call at the end of June for HRK 206 million in grants for the digitalisation of Croatian businesses.

The coronavirus pandemic has seen the promotion of paying for items by card popularised even more than ever before. Croatia is a country which typically loves cash transactions, but the warnings about how long the new coronavirus, COVID-19, can survive on surfaces like that of paper and banknotes has seen Croats take to swiping their cards more than ever before for safety reasons.

However, is the coronavirus outbreak the only driver of change in this respect for cash loving Croats? Maybe not...

As Novac writes on the 18th of May, 2020, the largest increase in online transactions made by Croats and paid for via Visa cards was in the categories of food from restaurants, courier services, grocery stores and for the purchase of household appliances.

For example, online payment for food ordered in restaurants and places that prepare food increased by 25 times, and the increase in Croats utilising the ability to make online payments for delivery services jumped by twenty times, as was shown by a new analysis undertaken by Visa Croatia.

Renata Vujasinovic, Country Manager of Visa Croatia, pointed out that the advantage of electronic payment is fast and secure access to a bank account, at any time and without additional costs implied, while cash payments includes time and sometimes fees for withdrawing money from a bank account from either a bank itself or from an ATM which belongs to a bank you don't have an account with.

''Paying by card is one of the safest and fastest ways for consumers to pay directly from home for any product or service they require for their daily needs - whether it's buying food or clothes, paying bills or transferring money to another person. In these quickly changing circumstances, Croatian customers are increasingly understanding the usefulness of buying consumer goods online,'' explained Vujasinovic.

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