SDK, Služba društvenog knjigovodstva. Literally, "service of social accounting". Not a bank, just a clearing house, but state run, and all the transactions between enterprises had to go through it. So it served as means of control as well - salaries couldn't be transfered to the workers' bank accounts, or (in rare cases where some still dared use it) into cash, unless all the taxes, contributions, self-contributions (i.e. temporary local voluntary taxes), payments into social security/health funds etc were correct to the last dinar. This initially caused a lot of backlog, but they got it to run smoothly. In the nineties, they were among the early adopters of modem communications; their software for online transactions was clumsy, complicated and generally horrible, but we'd get the stuff paid in minutes, with nobody leaving the office; we'd know who paid and who didn't, without having to call our bank(s). The so-called multilateral compensations, when A pays B, then B pays C etc, were done seamlessly overnight for the whole country (you'd end with the debts of those who'd pay anyway replaced with debts of deadbeats, though). Those were done manually as well, six guys would appear with payment slips, and the money would go from A to F in 30 minutes. Try that with banks. Try that today within one bank.
10-VI-2024 - 15-IV-2026