Since its establishment in 1992, the NRB has been in close contact with other public development banks on a bilateral basis. It enabled the Bank to learn from the experience of its counterparts and to increase its expertise in offering financial instruments to SMEs as well as in infrastructure financing.
Sharing Knowledge
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Bilateral cooperation with NPBIs from developed countries
Among our partners who helped us to develop our activities in the early and mid-1990s, we can mention, inter alia, Société française de garantie des financements des PME (France, now part of Bpifrance), BÜRGES Förderungsbank (Austria, now part of aws), Slovenská záručná a rozvojová banka (Slovakia), Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Germany) or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Although cooperation with other national promotional institutions has been formalized at the level of three European networks (namely AECM, ELTI and NEFI), the NRB retains close bilateral relations with many of them.
Later on, the NRB had an opportunity to meet and exchange with partner guarantee institutions from non-EU developed markets such as Japan or the Republic of Korea. This exchange was particularly intense between 2014 and 2015.
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Sharing knowledge with partner institutions from developing countries
Throughout the years, the NRB has increasingly become also a source of inspiration for partners from non-EU developing countries. We joined the initiative offering technical assistance for building SME ecosystem in Ukraine already in 1996-97, where we could share the Czech experience with the state support of the nascent SME segment.
Presentation of our business model and experience gained so far has become a standard part of our visibility activities during international conferences and workshops. We can mention International Conference on SME Finance, held in Minsk (Belarus) in September 2016, as one example of such conference. NRB participated in a panel entitled “Guarantee Funds as an Effective Tool of SME Finance”.
In the last few years, we have been cooperating mainly with the Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Crafts of the Czech Republic (AMSP) under the programme „Aid for Trade“. This initiative is managed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade and it is one of the tools of Czech development cooperation, which offers knowledge sharing with recipient countries. The NRB is pleased to have the opportunity to meet and discuss its activities with partners from Moldova (Organization for Small and Medium Enterprises Sector Development; ODIMM) or Zambia (Zambia Development Agency) during their repeated study visits to the Czech Republic. Both countries are among the six priority countries for the Czech development cooperation. Several other physical or virtual one-off meetings have been organized under the Aid for Trade programme, incl. with partners from Ethiopia (Ministry of Trade and Industry), Vietnam (Hanoi Association of SMEs) and Mongolia (SME Development Fund, Project for Market and Pasture Management Development, Ministry of Finance etc.).
In February 2020, the NRB hosted a group of representatives from the Central Banks and Ministries of Finance of Afghanistan and Nigeria during their study trip to Germany and the Czech Republic, organized by the German-based Credit Guarantee Fund Afghanistan (ACGF).
