Mini-Jobs, Women Entrepreneurs’ Rights and the Benefits of the New POS Programme: NALED Presents What’s in Store for Small Businesses in Niš
The introduction of “mini-jobs”, equalising the rights of women entrepreneurs and employed mothers, and the adoption of the Social Entrepreneurship Development Programme are priorities of the Small Business Council, presented at the ClickNi conference held at the Science and Technology Park Niš, organised by Infinito Capital and IMEC, with the Science and Technology Park as the official partner.
Irena Đorđević Šušić, Head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Unit at NALED, presented the activities of the Small Business Council aimed at improving the regulatory framework for doing business.
The Council’s priorities include developing a “mini-jobs” model to enable the legal and simpler engagement of workers while ensuring social protection, an initiative to equalise the rights of women entrepreneurs and employed mothers, and the adoption of the Social Entrepreneurship Development Programme.
On this occasion, she also presented the new POS Programme 2.0, which provides support to an additional 11,000 small businesses to introduce POS terminals without installation or maintenance costs and with a reduced merchant fee. All small businesses, entrepreneurs, public institutions, agricultural holdings and tourism accommodation providers that have not accepted card payments for at least the past year are eligible to apply and choose the POS terminal that best suits their needs.
Under the Programme’s new rules, merchants incur no installation or usage costs for POS terminals and no fixed fees. The subsidised merchant fee for payments made with Visa and Mastercard cards is capped at 0.5% for 12 months or until the annual transaction volume limit is reached.
It should be recalled that POS Programme 2.0 is part of the “Better Way” Cashless Payments Initiative, a regional project implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in partnership with Visa and Mastercard, aimed at improving financial inclusion and combating the shadow economy. In Serbia, Better Way is implemented under the develoPPP programme of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in cooperation with NALED and the Ministry of Finance.
The Programme is supported by numerous banks, electronic money institutions, payment institutions, and providers of fiscal cash registers and POS solutions. Applying is simple, and all interested parties can submit their applications independently via boljinacin.rs or through participating banks and payment acquirers.
