The Central Bank of Tunisia has published Circular to Banks No. 2026-08 of 1 September 2026, issued under Decree No. 148 of 2026 of 23 July 2026 setting the conditions and criteria for granting honour-based micro-financing. The text fixes what the Tunisian press had been reporting in substance without a reference: from 1 October 2026, applications for an honour loan or financing must be filed compulsorily and exclusively through an electronic platform that every subject bank has to build, and no application submitted by any other means is taken into account.
Key highlights
- Circular 2026-08 is dated 1 September 2026, signed by Governor Fethi Zouhaier Nouri, and enters into force on 1 October 2026 (Article 7).
- Article 3: filing is exclusive to the platform, with an electronic timestamp establishing the date and time of submission and allowing applications to be ranked by order of priority.
- The timestamped date and time are what the decision deadline under Article 6 of Decree 148 is computed from.
- The platform must automatically issue a receipt, delivered to the client by any means leaving a written trace, showing the timestamped date and time.
- Article 4: real-time declaration to the BCT Central Information Office at disbursement, using the category codes in Annex 1, plus a pre-disbursement check of the applicant's outstanding commitments.
- Article 5: two monthly statements to the BCT over the data-exchange system, within a maximum of fifteen days from the end of the month concerned.
What actually changed
The circular touches neither the amounts nor the financial conditions — those belong to Decree 148. What it fixes is the door, and how time is measured at it.
Before 1 October, a written application handed in at a branch had procedural meaning. After it, it has none: Article 3 states plainly that an application submitted by any means other than the dedicated platform is not taken into account. A place in the queue no longer depends on a branch relationship or on touring several banks, but on an electronic timestamp.
That timestamp is not a formality either: it is where the decision clock starts. As set out in the conditions and required documents, Decree 148 gives the bank ten banking working days to answer. The circular now says where those ten days begin: at the platform's timestamp, not at a date written in by a member of staff.
What the circular means for banks
Articles 4 and 5 are the part that requires building something, not a form page.
Article 4 requires a real-time declaration to the Central Information Office at the moment of disbursement, using the Annex 1 codes: 260 for short-term honour credit, 261 for short-term honour financing, 185 for unpaid principal on short-term honour credit, and 3400 for honour credit to individuals. It also requires, before disbursement, consulting the applicant's commitments to verify they do not already hold a credit or financing of the same category that has not been repaid in full. Duplicate control is therefore not an internal rule but a mandatory lookup against an external register, placed in the disbursement path itself.
Article 5, implementing Article 9 of Decree 148, requires two monthly statements: one on credits and financing granted from the resources of the honour financing line account, broken down by governorate, with the amounts recovered and not recovered; and one on the financing line account itself, listing every operation recorded on its debit and credit sides. Both go to the BCT over the data-exchange system, on the templates in Annexes 2 and 3, within a maximum of fifteen days after month-end.
Annex 3 goes further still: it asks for the date of the ordinary general meeting, the approved net accounting result, the size of the resources allocated to the line as 8 percent of that result, the account opening date and the date the funds were credited, then an opening balance, disbursements and a closing balance for each month.
In engineering terms: a secure public portal, a timestamp with evidentiary value, generation and delivery of a receipt with a written trace, computation of a statutory deadline from that timestamp, a real-time feed into the Central Information Office with category codes, and an automatically generated monthly regulatory report on two templates, with geographic breakdown and a recovered / not-recovered split. All of it under two constraints cited in the circular's preamble: Law No. 63 of 2004 on personal data protection and Decree-Law No. 17 of 2023 on cybersecurity. We have built exactly that, step by step — the timestamp as the record, priority ordering and the ten-day clock, the pre-disbursement registry check, and the Annex 2 and 3 statements — in implementing Circular 2026-08 in TypeScript.
The deadline is four weeks away.
What it means for the applicant
Waiting for the platforms to open does not stop anyone preparing the file. The application is a written request to the bank stating the applicant's capacity, the amount in figures and in words, its purpose and the bank account details. The honour-loan request tool produces the request in the form circulating under Decree 148, ready to copy into the bank's platform on the day it opens, and the amount in words tool writes the figure in its correct form — the form that prevails if the two disagree.
For the background that preceded the circular, namely the Central Bank's steer towards platforms and the lending timetable, see Honour loans: applications move to bank platforms.
What to watch next
Article 6 obliges banks to publicise, through appropriate communication channels, the conditions and procedures for filing, the stages of assessment and the decision. The useful indicator in September is not public statements but exactly that: which bank publishes its document list and a platform guide before 1 October, and which opens on the deadline with no instructions at all.
At Noqta we build this kind of intake and processing portal: mandatory fields, timestamping, receipts with a written trace, measurable deadlines, and connections to existing systems and regulatory reporting. If this project has landed on your desk with a short deadline, ask for a technical diagnostic before the tool is chosen for you.
Source: Central Bank of Tunisia — Circular to Banks No. 2026-08