World’s Best SME Banks 2026: Central and Eastern Europe

Across Central and Eastern Europe, small and midsize businesses are accelerating productivity gains through modernization and cross-border collaboration.

Regional Winner | CSOB

The Czech Republic’s Ceskoslovenska Obchodni Banka (CSOB) is this year’s regional winner as Best SME Bank in Central and Eastern Europe. By leveraging technology and a new creative campaign targeting SMEs, CSOB has acquired nearly 7,000 new clients over the past year. Also, the bank’s loan volume for SMEs increased by 6% year-on-year. The bank’s success is also due in part to its understanding of the SME landscape and the challenges posed by other banks that are more focused on the business-to-business (B2B) segment. CSOB achieves its success by investing in its people and technology, ensuring its pricing is competitive, offering a broad portfolio of products, and monitoring competition from fintechs.

CSOB has focused on digitalization and on development of an ecosystem with innovative products to attract customers. The bank has created a virtual branch that utilizes data to integrate the management of customer relationships with the customer experience.

The bank has also leveraged AI to digitalize and automate lending processes. CSOB has also introduced new products to help merchants run their operations smoothly, and the bank has introduced new credit products that link a merchant’s credit limit to the amount of card payments processed via CSOB’s payment terminal. Merchants can check eligibility online or through the mobile banking app.

For SMEs interested in ESG data, CSOB has partnered with Green0meter to produce reports on a company’s carbon footprint, operational efficiency, and risk management, among other key metrics.