Funding for Growth Scheme (Novekedesi Hitelprogram), central bank refinancing lent by commercial banks
Hungary's central bank refinanced commercial banks at zero interest on condition that they lent to small and medium firms at a capped margin under the Funding for Growth Scheme, and across its phases from June 2013 to 2022 some 75 thousand enterprises received about HUF 6,400 billion of loans, more than half of them investment loans.
75,000 enterprises (some), enterprises that gained access to fgs loans across all phases, 2013-2022. 6,400 HUF billion (approximately), loans granted under all fgs phases, 2013-2022. Magyar Nemzeti Bank, From the turnaround in lending to the green transition: collection of studies on the nine years of the Funding for Growth Scheme to date, 2013-2022, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The central bank offered banks zero-cost refinancing for loans to small and medium firms on condition that they cap the client rate, so banks did the origination, credit assessment and servicing while the central bank bore the funding cost.
Preconditions
- A central bank willing to run a targeted quasi-fiscal programme on its own balance sheet
- A banking sector with branch networks reaching small firms nationwide
- Low inflation at launch, so zero-rate refinancing did not fight monetary policy, which ceased to hold by 2022
Where else it has been used: The design follows the Bank of England's Funding for Lending Scheme (2012); Hungary ran it longer and steered it to fixed-rate investment loans, and the end of low inflation closed it.
Limits: The central bank designed, financed and here evaluates its own scheme; both headline numbers are rounded ('some', 'approximately') and appear in a PDF on page 7 and again on pages 9 and 20; the MNB also publishes a Power BI dashboard of the loans that a script cannot read. The MNB carried the funding cost and banks the credit risk, so the partnership was a public subsidy delivered by private lenders, with the policy cost sitting off budget on the central bank's balance sheet. The book's estimate that the scheme added more than 5 percentage points to GDP between 2013 and 2021 is the MNB's own model result and is not used here. Enterprises are counted across phases (FGS 1 to 3, FGS fix, FGS Go!, Green Home), so the 75 thousand cannot be compared with the stock of firms in any one year, and the volumes include refinanced foreign currency loans in the first phase. Some lending would have happened without the subsidy; the record does not measure additionality.