Viber to Launch Free Money Transfers in Serbia in 30 Days
Rakuten Viber, the National Bank of Serbia and PayChat unveiled in Nis a service that links a chat bot to a user's banking app, with no fee on the transfer itself.
Within less than 30 days, Viber users in Serbia will be able to send and receive money directly from the app, with no fee on the transfer itself. The announcement came today in Nis from Konstantin Kostadinov, director of strategic partnerships at Rakuten Viber, speaking at the tenth Advanced Technologies Forum at the Science and Technology Park.
According to Kostadinov, the project is a joint effort between Rakuten Viber, the National Bank of Serbia (NBS) and PayChat. The mechanism runs through a chat bot that users open for free inside Viber, which then links to their own bank’s app, where the transaction is confirmed.
“You connect to the chat bot for free, link it to your banking app, and then, just as you would send a message, you carry out the transfer for free,” Kostadinov said at the Forum in Nis.
The process he described has three steps: the user connects to the PayChat bot inside Viber, links it to their banking app, then chooses a recipient and an amount, while the transaction itself is confirmed inside the mobile banking app. The transfer costs the user nothing, and Kostadinov said the solution was built first for Serbia, with room to expand later to other markets in the region.
What hasn’t been announced yet
None of the sources at the Forum shared the technical and business details needed to judge how close the service actually is to a real rollout:
- which banks are taking part, and whether every commercial bank in Serbia will support linking to the chat bot
- whether there is a per-transaction limit or a daily limit for users
- the exact launch date. Only a window of less than 30 days from September 16 has been given
Without that information, the announcement from Nis remains a project outline rather than a finished product for now. The National Bank of Serbia’s exact role in the partnership was not spelled out further; sources describe the NBS only as one of three partners in the project, alongside Rakuten Viber and PayChat.
Context: the tenth Advanced Technologies Forum
The announcement came at an event that this year brought together more than 200 companies and over 170 experts, representatives of academia, the public sector and the startup community in Nis. Organizers used the occasion to point out that IT service exports from Serbia have reached 4.5 billion euros, ten times more than a decade ago, while it remains an open question whether modern technology, including financial services like this one, will reach traditional industries and not just the IT sector.
Payment through a chat bot is not itself a new idea, but this is the first public statement tying the National Bank of Serbia to a concrete solution that combines Viber, as a communication platform, with mobile banking, as a regulated financial channel. For users, that would mean money transfers become part of the same app they already use to exchange messages, instead of a separate trip through a banking app from start to finish.
Until the service officially launches, expected by mid-October according to the announcement, a concrete list of participating banks is still missing, along with any statement from the National Bank of Serbia detailing oversight of these transfers.
For the Forum itself, payments through Viber were just one of several threads running through the program. Organizers said the central question remains how artificial intelligence and digitalization are reshaping industry and the labor market, and payment through a chat bot is a concrete example of how a communication app, originally built for exchanging messages, is expanding into a channel for financial services.
