Starting October 2025 also Macedonian banks should apply the standards of SEPA. That means providing better and faster service at lower cost.
The National Bank has already abolished the obligations to submit documentation for current transactions abroad, including for paying vacation or tuition fees abroad, and will also be abolished for capital transactions, except for a small number of transactions for which there are explicit legal obligations.
That means that there should be no more obligation to provide documents with your payment order or to receive money.
You should be able to send money from Skopje to your daughter in Strasbourg without discussing with a bank clerk if this is for her studies, her dog, for a new dress or just to party.
If your bank does not follow the National Bank guidelines, customers have a remedy: using a foreign account. Instead to bother with local banks, they can open an account elsewhere – and send payments with low costs to Macedonian accounts. Some banks like Revolut, N26 or else have made this a business model and they have pushed other banks into improving their service.
To be seen if they offer accounts to Macedonian citizens as long as the country is not in the EU. But for companies with foreign mothers, this is a realistic option to do at least a large share of their operations out of an account based elsewhere. Slovenian banks, still somewhat adhering to Tito-time processes, have made the experiences. Foreign banks closed their offices in Slovenia and offer the customers to run all operations out of more customer-friendly countries like Austria.
Read the full article in Nezavisen
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