ASEE Serbia Completes Central Address Scheme Implementation in Four Banks in Serbia

ASEE team in Serbia successfully completed the implementation of CAS (Central Address Scheme). CAS is a new service offered to citizens, current account holders at domestic banks, and it simplifies P2P transactions by eliminating the need to know the recipient's account number. Introducing CAS to the market has versatile applications. It is a service that will quickly "come to life" in the market and be interesting for the general population because it makes instant payments even more frictionless and easy.

How Will CAS Simplify Payments?

When registering to use the service, users will input two of their details: an avatar (usually a mobile number or email) and an account ID. The Central Address Scheme (maintained by the NBS - National Bank of Serbia) will match the account with a chosen avatar. In this way, customers can make P2P payments just using a mobile phone or some other information of the recipient, with no need to use the lengthy account number.

CAS is essentially an upgrade of a large project for instant payments. In addition to P2P, it opens the possibility for more potential benefits.

An additional application for further expansion is to register other aliases such as license plates in order to allow some other types of payments. For example, when entering and leaving a parking lot, the camera registers the number of the license plate and charges for parking directly from the account exactly as much as the car has spent in the parking lot, per second.

By the same principle, tolls could be charged at toll points.

The development of CAS requires changes in the bank's core system, the bank's payment gateway, eBanking application, and related services.

The main challenge was to harmonize the functionalities of the Central Addressing Scheme so that it would be additionally monitored by the core banking system, which is obliged to inform the NBS about the possible changes relevant to CAS. Accordingly, all the information contained in the CAS had to be tracked adequately in the core system and vice versa.