National Bank of Yugoslavia
[2]: 296 In application of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the National Bank received a significant amount of gold bullion from the Austro-Hungarian Bank in Vienna and took over its branches in the significant parts of the new country that had been part of the Habsburg monarchy, namely Slovenia, Croatia, Vojvodina, Bosnia and Herzegovina: these included Zagreb, Varaždin, Split, Osijek, Ljubljana, Maribor, Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka, Zemun, Novi Sad, Veliki Bečkerek, Subotica, Pančevo, and Vršac.
Meanwhile, in early 1920 a conflict of competence with the Zagreb-based National Bank was resolved, as a result of which the Croatian upstart was renamed Slavenska Banka.
Then in 1921 the double-named currency concept was abandoned and another exchange replaced the dinar-crown notes with ones exclusively denominated in dinar,[1]: 7 after which the crown eventually lost legal tender status on 1 January 1923.
[3]: 155, 162 The poorly organized transition was marked by widespread fraud as krone banknotes printed in Hungary were imported in contraband into Yugoslavia.
By the end of 1930, none of Yugoslavia's twelve largest banks, which in aggregate represented half of the system's total assets, was headquartered in Serbia (or Montenegro): eight were in Zagreb, effectively the country's financial center despite the presence of large state-owned credit institutions in Belgrade, three in Ljubljana, and one in Sarajevo.
[1]: 19 This led all domestic banks, which were weakened by illiquid investments in industrial companies[1]: 38 and from April 1932 by a government-imposed moratorium on agricultural debt repayment,[1]: viii to a state of de facto insolvency that lasted essentially until the German in 1941, even though foreign-invested banks fared better thanks to external financial support.
[3]: 177 In the second half of 1940 the National Bank, whose capital had been held since its creation in the 1880s by about twenty Serbian merchant families,[3]: 157 was nationalized, by way of an equity injection after which state institutions held 52 percent of its share capital, financed by bonds issued by the State Mortgage Bank of Yugoslavia.
[3]: 181 By 1939, the National Bank had branches in Banja Luka, Bitola, Cetinje, Dubrovnik, Ljubljana, Maribor, Mostar, Niš, Novi Sad, Osijek, Pančevo, Petrovgrad, Šabac, Sarajevo, Skopje, Split, Subotica, Sušak, Varaždin, Vršac, and Zagreb.
[1]: 105 The Yugoslav government-in-exile immediately issued a decree depriving Radosavljević of his position, and appointed Dobrivoje Lazarević as Governor.
[1]: 88 It had branches in Banja Luka, Dubrovnik, Karlovac, Mostar, Osijek, Sarajevo, Varaždin, and Zemun, most of which were taken over from the National Bank of Yugoslavia.
[11]: 747 From 1952 to 1955, Yugoslavia exhibited a pure monobank system in which the National Bank was the single financial intermediary for the entire country.
[14] In January 1991, it was revealed that the Parliament of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia had passed secret legislation compelling the respective National Banks of Serbia, Kosovo and Vojvodina to provide $1.8 billion worth of funding without approval or knowledge of the federal government, in egregious breach of the Yugoslav monetary system's legal framework that was described as "theft from the other republics" and "an astonishing act of economic sabotage".
In late 1992, all four republics became members of the International Monetary Fund, as also did rump Yugoslavia which in the meantime had renamed itself Serbia and Montenegro.
It then developed a program of construction of new branches, entrusted to architect Bogdan Nestorović [sr], the most prominent of which were those in Dubrovnik, Karlovac, Kragujevac, Mostar, Šabac, and Skopje.
