The meeting was kicked off by the welcoming words of Ms Krisztina Júlia Szabó, Head of Department in the Managing Authority for EDIOP in the Ministry for National Economy. After greeting participants Ms Szabó pointed out that the ATMforSMEs project is an excellent opportunity for the Ministry for National Economy in the field of microfinancing to SMEs and support social enterprises in a period when the EDIOP Managing Authority has the mission to manage a financial instruments programme from Structural Funds that is unprecedented in Hungary in size and diversity. Priority Axis No. 8 of the Economic Development and Innovation Operational Programme is more than EUR 2.2 billion. Successful management of this programme cannot be achieved without leaning on the Ministry’s implementation experience from the previous programming period or without permanent learning from peers across Europe. ATMforSMEs offers an excellent partnership in terms of diverse backgrounds and experience and will create a lot of learning opportunities for the Ministry. Ms Szabó stressed the importance of the involvement of local stakeholders. Local stakeholders are vital in bringing their own perspectives, sharing their valuable experience, putting the project objectives and activities into the local context and help realise the local actions planned in the project. Ms Szabó asked for active participation from the members of the local stakeholder group.
Ms Jenei Gerő spoke about the identification of good practices among current tasks. She presented the proposed structure for introducing each identified good practice and the specific topics of good practices. Then she encouraged participants to name practices that could be worked with as local good practices during the project. Participants named the following subjects, practices:
1. Combined grant and micro-credit scheme structure (ratio of grant and micro-credit, required own source) in the Economic Development Operational Programme (EDOP) 2007-2013
2. Application and selection procedures of the combined scheme in EDOP 2007-2013
3. Building up a broad financial intermediary level in the financial instruments institutional structure in the 2007-2013 programming period
4. Customised requirements for the differing financial intermediaries in the 2007-2013 programming period
5. Terms of reference for new products under Priority Axis No. 8 (e. g. ICT-focused SMEs)
Participants agreed that the good practices would be elaborated building on the above subjects.
