🇵🇱 Payments in Central and Eastern Europe

One region, six currencies, two speeds

Central and Eastern Europe is a collection of payment markets, each built on its own infrastructure. The loose label “Eastern Europe” covers systems that share no common infrastructure. The region has the highest density of national infrastructures on the continent. Each country has built its own clearing system, often its own instant payment rail, and sometimes its own card scheme. These pieces do not overlap. The line that organizes it all is membership of the euro area, which determines access to TIPS, the scope of the Instant Payments Regulation, and the digital euro timeline. Membership of the broader European Union determines none of these on its own.

The first group is the countries with their own currency: Poland (PLN), Czechia (CZK), Hungary (HUF), and Romania (RON). They run high-volume domestic rails that sit outside the scope of the EU's instant payment obligations for the euro. A merchant accepting payments there maintains two parallel infrastructures, one in local currency and one in euro. The second group is the newer euro area members: Slovenia joined in 2007, Slovakia in 2009, Estonia in 2011, Latvia in 2014, Lithuania in 2015, Croatia in 2023, and Bulgaria in 2026. Their national rails shut down or convert as they join.

Poland: BLIK, the domestic scheme that beat the cards

BLIK is a national payment initiation system launched in 2015 and operated by Polski Standard Płatności, a company owned by a consortium of Polish banks. It needs no card and no third-party app. The user opens their own bank's app, generates a six-digit code valid for a few minutes, enters it on the checkout page, and then confirms the payment in the app. No card number is entered, no PAN travels, and confirmation happens in an environment where the user is already authenticated.

The National Bank of Poland (NBP) measures BLIK's share of online commerce at 49.7% of e-commerce transactions by number and 44.9% by value. The figure comes from the report “Zwyczaje płatnicze w Polsce w 2023 r.” (Payment habits in Poland in 2023), published in late 2024 and based on a payment diary survey conducted in September and October 2023. At that level, a single domestic payment method outweighs all online card payments combined. No national equivalent anywhere on the continent comes close. For 2025, Polski Standard Płatności reports 2.9 billion transactions worth PLN 441.5 billion, up 21% by number and 27% by value. At the end of December 2025, it had 20.7 million active accounts.

• Never push BLIK below cards in the checkout: in Poland it is the default customers expect, not an exotic option.
• Use a local PSP (PayU, Przelewy24, Tpay, Autopay) that offers BLIK, cards, and bank buttons (pay-by-link) under a single contract.
• Support pay-by-link: beyond BLIK, transfers initiated from the customer's online banking remain a major channel in Polish e-commerce, especially for large amounts.
• Track the code expiry rate as a conversion KPI in its own right: it is the main optimization lever specific to BLIK.
• Plan for regional expansion: Polski Standard Płatności has acquired the Slovak company Viamo, now BLIK SK, a.s., and aims to integrate with several large Romanian banks. A BLIK contract may become multi-country.

Poland: three rails for the zloty, a fourth for the euro

Poland's interbank infrastructure, which BLIK runs on, consists of three zloty systems and a fourth dedicated to the euro. Krajowa Izba Rozliczeniowa (KIR), the clearing house owned by the banks and the National Bank of Poland, operates most of it. Elixir, in service since 1994, handles bulk clearing in zloty in daily sessions and remains the default rail for non-urgent credit transfers. Express Elixir, launched in 2012, carries instant payments in zloty. Net positions settle in the central bank's RTGS system, SORBNET3, which is built on ISO 20022 and went live on September 8, 2025, replacing SORBNET2, in operation since 2013.

Two features set the Polish system apart. The first is two competing instant payment infrastructures on the same domestic market. Express Elixir belongs to KIR, while BlueCash has been run since 2011 by Autopay S.A., formerly Blue Media. A Polish bank may connect to one, the other, or both. Instant execution is therefore guaranteed only between two banks on the same system, and the end-to-end failure rate depends on the pair of banks involved. The second feature is Euro Elixir, KIR's SEPA arm, connected to STEP2, through which a Polish bank sends and receives SEPA credit transfers without a correspondent bank in the euro area. This gives the zloty market direct access to euro flows.

Two more players complete the picture. Paybynet, a KIR service, moves funds directly from the payer's account to the payee's, with the fields prefilled. It comes with a written KIR guarantee covering 100% of the amount and is natively integrated with ePUAP, Poland's public services platform. Administrative fees are usually paid through this channel. Autopay is both an infrastructure operator, through BlueCash, and a merchant PSP. The same company thus sits on both sides of the chain, as rail operator and as the merchant's provider, a dual role that any tender should document.

Hungary: instant payments by decree, then QR codes by decree

AFR (Azonnali Fizetési Rendszer, marketed as GIROInstant) is Hungary's instant credit transfer rail. It went live in March 2020 and is operated by GIRO Zrt., a subsidiary of the central bank, Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB). Hungary introduced it by mandating instant payments through regulation, with no voluntary phase, an approach unmatched in Europe. From day one, all banks had to take part. They must execute any electronic forint transfer below a regulatory limit instantly, in under five seconds. That limit rose from HUF 10 million to HUF 20 million on September 1, 2023. The VIBER RTGS system (MNB, 1999) settles AFR positions, as it does those of the BKR bulk clearing system (GIRO Zrt., 1994).

The central bank then added a merchant acceptance layer on top of the rail, and made that mandatory too. This layer, qvik, has been available since September 1, 2024. Its reach comes from how it was deployed rather than from its technology. It is a feature built into existing banking apps, not a separate app to download. The law requires all Hungarian payment service providers to offer it in their own banking app. On launch day, the installed base therefore already covered every banked customer in the country.

• Cost is the core argument: qvik is free for consumers (Section 36/E of Hungary's Act LXXXV of 2009 on payment services guarantees this), and banks may charge merchants, but at a level billed as well below the cost of card acceptance. It is a direct and openly declared attack on interchange.
• Four flows coexist: qvik-QR (a dynamic QR code shown at the register or at checkout), qvik-NFC, qvik-LINK (a payment link), and qvik-kérelem (a payment request), which notably covers invoicing.
• Funds arrive instantly in the merchant's account: no clearing cycle, no settlement lag to finance, and a cash flow gain that weighs in the comparison with cards.
• No scheme chargebacks: as with BLIK, disputes fall under credit transfer law. A merchant that moves part of its volume to qvik cuts its acceptance costs but takes on a different risk profile, and must adjust its refund policy.
• The usual integration point is SimplePay Zrt. (formerly OTP Mobil Kft., renamed in July 2025), Hungary's leading PSP, which offers card acceptance, terminals, tokenization, and qvik.

Czechia and Slovakia: opposite strategies after the split

Thirty years after the split, the two countries have gone in opposite directions on payment infrastructure. Czechia has concentrated all its interbank flows in a single system. CERTIS, in service since 1992, is the country's only interbank system. The central bank, Česká národní banka (ČNB), operates it directly, and it serves as both the RTGS and the bulk clearing system. In 2024 it processed 983 million transactions worth CZK 386,500 billion, or about 3.9 million a day. Since May 2025, it has been open to non-bank payment institutions. That is rare in Europe, where access to settlement systems is still reserved for banks almost everywhere.

Slovakia, which joined the euro area in 2009, took the opposite route, relying on Eurosystem infrastructure instead of building its own. Its retail clearing system, SIPS, run by Národná banka Slovenska since 2003 with four clearing cycles a day, is a TARGET ancillary system. The NBS deliberately chose not to add instant payments to it. Slovak banks connect directly to TIPS, the Eurosystem platform, and gross settlement runs through TARGET-SK. The country therefore has no national infrastructure to maintain, and changes to the service depend on Eurosystem decisions.

Three local features round out the picture. SIPO (Soustředěné inkaso plateb obyvatelstva), run by the Czech postal service Česká pošta, bundles all of a household's recurring payments (rent, energy, insurance, and license fees) into a single monthly payment. A personal connection number identifies that payment, which can be made at a post office counter or by direct debit. Since March 1, 2018, the service has been governed by Act No. 370/2017 Coll. on payment services. In installment payments, Czechia has brought BNPL into the banking system. Skip Pay (formerly MallPay) is run in partnership with ČSOB, a KBC Group bank, and claims more than 130,000 active users and more than 33,000 partner online merchants. Twisto remains the independent pioneer. Finally, in Slovakia, Polski Standard Płatności's acquisition of Viamo makes the country BLIK's entry point into the euro area. The company now trades as BLIK SK, a.s., and its merchant gateway offers BLIK alongside cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Sporopay.

Romania and Bulgaria: cash on delivery, cards, and the switch to the euro

Romania and Bulgaria are the EU's two youngest markets for cashless payments, and both have some of the highest cash usage in Europe. Their paths have diverged since January 1, 2026, when Bulgaria adopted the euro and Romania kept the leu. The switch retired a whole layer of Bulgarian national infrastructure and brought the country fully within the scope of EU obligations. Romania still runs two parallel rails, one in leu and one in euro.

In Romania, the entire infrastructure is run by TRANSFOND S.A., a company owned by the Banca Națională a României (BNR) and the commercial banks. Under this mixed governance, the central bank and the banks that use the systems are shareholders in the same operator. TRANSFOND runs ReGIS (the leu RTGS system, since 2005), SENT (bulk clearing in RON and EUR, since 2005), and Plăți instant (instant payments in leu since 2019, settled in under 10 seconds, 24/7/365). On top of these systems sits RoPay, the national initiation layer run by TRANSFOND with the Romanian Association of Banks (ARB). It covers QR codes, deep links, NFC, and the phone number as an IBAN proxy. The scheme is updated in successive versions: the register of institutions participating in the RoPay RON scheme is dated December 17, 2025, and version RoPay_V02R02 takes effect on April 30, 2026.

Cash-heavy markets: read the figure before interpreting it

Digitizing credit transfers and replacing cash at the point of sale are two separate trends, and this region shows them apart. It has both Europe's most advanced instant payment markets and markets where cash still dominates at the point of sale. Digitizing credit transfers concerns the interbank channel, while the decline of cash concerns how people pay in stores. An acceptance decision based on the first indicator will therefore misread the second. Slovenia ranks among Europe's leaders in SEPA instant payments, and also among the euro area countries where people pay most in cash.

The gap between cash's share by number of payments and its share by value shows how usage varies with the amount. In Poland, cash accounts for 40.2% of payments but only 28.1% of value: it dominates small purchases and fades on large ones. A convenience store with a low average ticket and an appliance retailer therefore face different realities, in the same country and the same year. The national average blends the two and describes neither accurately.

The digital euro and the IPR: national exceptions on the way out

Two pieces of EU legislation will erode the national specifics described above over this decade. The first is already in force. Regulation (EU) 2024/886 on instant credit transfers, known as the IPR (Instant Payments Regulation), has required euro area providers to receive instant credit transfers in euro since January 9, 2025, and to send them since October 9, 2025. It also requires price parity with standard credit transfers and payee verification (Verification of Payee). Providers based in a member state whose currency is not the euro have later deadlines. For the four countries in the region outside the euro area, receiving becomes mandatory on January 9, 2027, and sending instant credit transfers in euro on July 9, 2027.

The second, the regulation establishing the digital euro, has not yet been adopted. The ECB Governing Council decided in October 2025 to move the project to its next phase, and a version 0.91 rulebook was published in July 2026. The announced timeline depends on the adoption of the EU legislation. If it is adopted, a 12-month pilot is to start in the second half of 2027, with a possible first issuance in 2029 as the goal. The final decision to issue, and its date, will rest with the Governing Council only once the legislation is adopted.

The periphery: the Baltics, the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and Moldova

Beyond the region's core, three groups follow their own logic. The Baltic states, early euro adopters, opened their national systems to institutions based outside their borders. Their central banks have thus become infrastructure providers for all of Europe. The Western Balkans, outside the EU, are building regional interoperability on Eurosystem technology. Ukraine and Moldova run systems managed directly by their central banks, where digital payments are also a matter of keeping the state running.

• Ukraine: mass-market payments run through banking apps more than through traditional merchant rails, namely Privat24 (PrivatBank, nationalized in 2016), monobank (operated by JSC Universal Bank), and NovaPay, a subsidiary of logistics group Nova Poshta registered with the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) as a payment service provider. The card activation rate is a telling indicator of its own: only 44% of the 148.7 million cards issued were active in early 2026.
• Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro: the central banks (CBBH, CBCG) run both the RTGS and retail clearing systems themselves. Serbia also runs a euro clearing system with these two countries, based on bilateral agreements between the central banks.
• Estonia: the opposite textbook case. The national clearing system, ESTA, run by Eesti Pank, closed on January 31, 2014 for lack of participants. Even with pricing cut to two euro cents per payment, banks preferred their own channels. Public infrastructure does not win on price alone.
• Due diligence rule: outside the EU, do not assume settlement finality, protection against a participant's insolvency, or the system's legal status. Check them in the national payment services law and in the central bank's designation. In Serbia, for example, the RTGS and clearing systems are explicitly designated as essential payment systems, with protected finality.