The National Bank of Moldova’s (NBM) MIA Instant Payments project won two awards at the International Customer Experience Awards 2026: the Gold Award in the “Best Business Change & Transformation” category and the Silver Award in the “Best Citizen Experience” category. The awards were presented at a ceremony held in London on 5 November 2026.
These awards represent international recognition of the transformation achieved by MIA in the Republic of Moldova’s payments ecosystem and of the benefits brought to citizens and businesses through simpler, faster and more accessible financial services.
The Gold Award in the "Best Business Change & Transformation" category highlights the scale of the change: the development of a shared instant payments infrastructure and the mobilisation of the financial sector to transform this infrastructure into services that benefit people and businesses. The Silver Award in the "Best Citizen Experience" category highlights the project’s focus on citizens’ needs, the simplification of the payment experience and its contribution to financial inclusion.
“These awards reflect the hard work of the NBM team and the contribution of everyone who has helped develop MIA alongside us. Together with commercial banks, non-bank payment service providers, technology solution providers and institutional partners, we have built the infrastructure and integrated MIA into payment applications. By doing so, we have offered people a simpler way to make payments, and entrepreneurs the opportunity to receive money from customers more quickly, directly into their accounts. This recognition encourages us to continue developing MIA, so that increasingly more people and entrepreneurs can benefit from the advantages of instant payments, through solutions that are accessible, secure and easy to use,” emphasised the Governor of the National Bank of Moldova, Ms Anca Dragu.
Launched in March 2024, the MIA Instant Payments system - a project initiated in 2022 by the late Deputy Governor Arcadie Albul - enables money to be transferred in a matter of seconds, at any time of day, including on weekends and public holidays. In less than three years, MIA has reached nearly 1.1 million users and processed over 38.8 million transactions, totalling approximately MDL 36 billion. The expansion of MIA to include in-store and online payments, utility bill payments and business-to-business payments makes digital payments easier to use and contributes to the modernisation of the Republic of Moldova’s economy.
