🇭🇺 Payments in Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia

Three markets, two national currencies, three approaches

Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia are three neighboring payment markets whose architectures were built on different principles. Hungary made instant credit transfers mandatory by regulation, then added a merchant acceptance standard on top that every bank has to offer. Czechia put its central bank in charge of the country’s only interbank system and standardized the QR code for credit transfers back in 2012. Slovakia, which joined the euro area in 2009, built no national infrastructure and connects to the Eurosystem’s instead. Describing the three countries as one would be inaccurate, because the same payment method is governed by different rules in each market.

A second fault line runs through the region: taxation of the transaction itself. Hungary has levied a duty on payment transactions since 2012, and Slovakia introduced its own in 2025. Czechia has none. A single cost model for all three markets is therefore wrong in two out of three cases, because Hungary and Slovakia add a tax on top of the service price that doesn’t exist in Czechia.

Hungary: AFR, instant payments mandated with no voluntary phase

The AFR system (Azonnali Fizetési Rendszer), marketed as GIROInstant, went live in March 2020. It is run by GIRO Zrt., a subsidiary of the central bank, Magyar Nemzeti Bank. Hungary skipped a voluntary opt-in phase: all banks had to participate from day one. They must execute any electronic forint transfer below a regulatory threshold in under five seconds, 24 hours a day. That threshold rose from HUF 10 million to HUF 20 million on September 1, 2023. No other European country had made participation mandatory from the day its instant payment service launched.

Hungary’s architecture has three layers. VIBER, the MNB’s RTGS system, live since 1999, settles in central bank money. The BKR (Bankközi Klíring Rendszer), run by GIRO Zrt. since 1994, clears bulk payments. The AFR is the BKR’s instant segment, not a separate system, and the MNB reports its volumes on that basis. In Q3 2025, the BKR cleared 105 million transactions worth HUF 63 trillion, including 52 million transactions worth about HUF 10.8 trillion through instant clearing. Instant transactions thus accounted for nearly half of all payments cleared in the quarter.

qvik: the national QR code banks must offer and merchants get for free

qvik is the merchant acceptance layer built on Hungary’s instant credit transfer, launched on September 1, 2024. What sets it apart from payment apps is how it was rolled out. qvik is a feature that every Hungarian payment service provider is legally required to offer in its own banking app. On launch day, its installed base was every banked customer in the country. A private wallet, by contrast, starts from zero and builds its user base one download at a time.

Regulation sets the code format; integrators don’t get to choose it. MNB Decree 35/2017 (XII. 14.) on the execution of payment transactions, as amended by Decrees 57/2022 (XII. 22.) and 65/2023 (XII. 15.), sets out in its Annex 5 the technical specifications for the QR code, deep link, and NFC flows, which have applied since February 1, 2024. An in-house QR code, or a wallet’s proprietary QR code brought over from another market, therefore won’t work in Hungary. No Hungarian banking app can read it.

Hungary: the illeték, the constitutional right to cash, e-receipts

Hungary taxes the movement of funds itself. Act CXVI of 2012 created the pénzügyi tranzakciós illeték, a duty on payment transactions that the provider owes and, in practice, passes on to the customer. Government Decree 183/2024 raised the rates on August 1, 2024. The standard rate went from 0.3% to 0.45%, the per-transaction cap from HUF 10,000 to HUF 20,000, and the rate on cash withdrawals from 0.6% to 0.9%. Since October 1, 2024, an additional 0.45% charge, also capped at HUF 20,000, has applied to transactions involving a currency conversion.

The rate schedule has three distinct effects on payment behavior. Cash withdrawals are taxed at 0.9% with no cap, so they get more expensive the more you withdraw, while other transactions stay capped; the larger the amount, the stronger the push away from cash. The flat annual charge on cards doesn’t depend on how often the card is used: a card used twice a year costs the bank as much as one used a thousand times. Credit transfers, capped at HUF 20,000 in duty per transaction, become negligible in relative terms on large amounts. Together, these three effects explain why the Hungarian government is pushing the instant rail and why banks are happy to go along.

Hungary has two acceptance mandates that pull in opposite directions, and merchants must comply with both. Since January 1, 2021, any merchant using an online cash register must offer at least one electronic payment method, either card or instant credit transfer. That requirement comes from an amendment to Act CLXIV of 2005 on trade. The opposite requirement arrived four years later. The 15th amendment to the Alaptörvény, Hungary’s constitution, adopted on April 14, 2025, makes paying in cash a constitutional right. Since July 1, 2025, the same merchants must accept cash. Act XVIII of 2025, meanwhile, requires providers to guarantee access to cash withdrawals in every municipality. It also raises the minimum limit per ATM withdrawal from HUF 75,000 to HUF 150,000.

Czechia: CERTIS, a single system run by the central bank

CERTIS, live since 1992, is Czechia’s only interbank system, run directly by the central bank, Česká národní banka (ČNB). It handles both gross settlement and bulk clearing. That is unusual in Europe, where the two functions almost always sit in separate systems, often with different operators. In 2024, CERTIS processed 983 million transactions worth CZK 386.5 trillion, or about 3.9 million transactions a day. Since May 2025, it has been open to nonbank payment institutions.

Czech instant payments are a module within CERTIS, live since 2018, not a separate system. So there is no Czech instant payment scheme, no separate membership agreement, and no parallel user committee. A bank already connected to CERTIS gets access to instant payments with no extra steps. The lack of an intermediate layer explains how quickly adoption took off. Coverage rose from 41% of bank customers in 2019 to 99% as of April 9, 2025, according to the ČNB.

Czechia still has no timeline for joining the euro area. The Ministry of Finance and the ČNB publish a joint assessment of the country’s readiness every year, and they consistently recommend not setting a target date. Czechia doesn’t meet all the convergence criteria, and the ČNB openly values the floating exchange rate as a shock absorber. Invoicing and payment collection therefore happen in koruna. Currency risk is a permanent fact of life for a seller whose books are kept in another currency.

QR Platba and SPD: Czechia standardized credit transfers, not cards

The Czech standard is called QR Platba and is based on a string format called SPD (Short Payment Descriptor), also known as SPAYD. The Czech Banking Association, Česká bankovní asociace, adopted it on November 14, 2012, and rolled it out to every bank in the country as a local standard; version 1.0 is still current. The QR code encodes a credit transfer order with the payee’s IBAN, the amount, the currency, and the reconciliation references. The format therefore covers only how a credit transfer is initiated. It has nothing to do with card acceptance standards.

SPD1.0*ACC:CZ6508000000192000145399*AM:24200.00*CC:CZK*X-VS:2026042*DT:20260731*MSG:FAKTURA 2026042

SPD1.0  prefix and format version (adopted by the CBA on November 14, 2012)
ACC     payee IBAN; a fallback account may follow in ALT-ACC
AM      amount, decimal point, no thousands separator
CC      ISO 4217 currency: CZK in nearly all domestic cases
X-VS    variabilni symbol: THE Czech reconciliation reference
DT      due date, YYYYMMDD
MSG     free-text message shown to the payer (optional)

The X-VS field carries the Czech reconciliation reference, which has no direct equivalent outside the country. The variabilní symbol is the numeric reference the payee uses to identify what is owed, typically an invoice, contract, or order number. The konstantní symbol codes the type of transaction, and the specifický symbol adds a second level of detail. Czech reconciliation relies entirely on these three fields, not on the free-text description. A foreign business that puts its reference in MSG will receive payments it can’t match.

Three local features round out the picture of the Czech market. SIPO (Soustředěné inkaso plateb obyvatelstva), run by the postal operator Česká pošta, bundles a household’s recurring payments (rent, utilities, insurance, license fees) into a single monthly payment identified by a personal connection number. Since March 1, 2018, it has been governed by Act No. 370/2017 Sb. on payment services. Second, installment payments have been brought into the banks. Skip Pay, formerly MallPay, run in partnership with ČSOB, the KBC group’s Czech bank, reports more than 130,000 active users and over 33,000 partner merchants. Twisto remains the independent pioneer. Finally, the fiscal cash register disappeared when Act No. 458/2022 Sb. abolished the electronic sales records system (EET) on January 1, 2023, including its voluntary version.

Slovakia: the euro, TIPS, and mandatory acceptance of cashless payments

Slovakia joined the euro area on January 1, 2009, and that decision has shaped its infrastructure policy ever since: the country doesn’t build a national rail where the Eurosystem already provides one. Gross settlement runs through TARGET-SK, the Slovak component of T2. Retail clearing is handled by SIPS, run by Národná banka Slovenska since 2003, with four cycles a day and settlement as a TARGET ancillary system. For instant payments, the NBS explicitly chose not to build the service into SIPS. Slovak banks connect directly to TIPS instead.

Slovakia rolled out instant payments in two phases: first as a bank-led initiative, then as a regulatory requirement. The three largest banks (Slovenská sporiteľňa, Tatra banka, and VÚB banka) launched the service in February 2022, and the others followed. Since October 2025, every Slovak bank has sent instant credit transfers, as required by Regulation (EU) 2024/886. Since October 9, 2025, the same regulation has also required verification of payee, free of charge for the customer. It also bars banks from charging more for an instant transfer than for a standard SEPA credit transfer.

In Slovakia, the requirement to accept cashless payments comes from the sales registration law, which was overhauled in 2026. Act No. 384/2025 Z. z. on sales registration, in force since January 1, 2026, replaces Act No. 289/2008 Z. z. and scraps the list of services previously exempt from eKasa, the national e-register system. It requires sellers to accept cashless payment for any sale over €1, and they can’t impose a minimum amount on customers. The deadline, originally March 1, 2026, was pushed back to May 1, 2026.

Viamo is Slovakia’s person-to-person payment service based on phone numbers. It has come under the control of the Polski Standard Płatności group and now operates as BLIK SK, a.s. Its merchant gateway offers BLIK alongside cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Sporopay, which makes Slovakia the de facto gateway for the Polish standard into the euro area. A BLIK contract negotiated in Poland doesn’t necessarily cover acceptance in Slovakia, since geographic scope depends on the contract terms.

Two transaction taxes and capped interchange

Slovakia introduced its own financial transaction tax in 2025. Like Hungary’s illeték, it is levied on account debits, but it rests on a different principle: the Hungarian duty is owed by the provider, while the Slovak tax is owed by the holder of the debited account. Act No. 279/2024 Z. z. on the financial transaction tax took effect on January 1, 2025, and has applied to transactions since April 1, 2025. The standard rate is 0.4% of the amount debited, capped at €40 per transaction, and cash withdrawals are taxed at 0.8% with no cap. Every payment card used at least once in the year incurs €2. Recharged costs (preúčtované náklady) are also in scope, at the same rate and with the same cap.

Effective January 1, 2026, Slovak Act No. 272/2025 Z. z. removed self-employed individuals from the scope, including tradespeople, lawyers, tax advisers, doctors, and architects. Legal entities remain liable, with exemptions for certain public and nonprofit bodies. The same act clarifies the definitions of financial transaction, transaction account, permanent establishment, and recharged cost. The tax now targets legal entities, but nothing changes in how it works for a commercial company.

For cards, by contrast, the rules are the same across the region: all three countries are EU members and therefore subject to Regulation (EU) 2015/751, the Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR). Interchange is capped at 0.2% on consumer debit cards and 0.3% on credit cards. The cap also applies to domestic transactions in forint or koruna. Article 8 guarantees the cardholder’s choice of brand, and Article 9 requires fee transparency. None of the three markets has a live domestic card scheme, so in practice that choice comes down to Visa or Mastercard. With interchange capped by regulation, savings have to come from elsewhere: scheme fees, the acquirer’s margin, and shifting volume to the instant rail.

Operating in the region: what to integrate and who to know

• Bill in the customer’s currency: forint in Hungary, koruna in Czechia, euros in Slovakia. Showing prices in euros in Prague or Budapest exposes cardholders to DCC and hurts conversion.
• Integrate the local A2A rail, not just cards: qvik in Hungary, instant credit transfers with QR Platba in Czechia, SK-QR with NOP notifications in Slovakia. All three rely on the same underlying mechanism: a credit transfer, not an authorization.
• Confirm the funds have arrived before handing over the goods wherever QR codes are used: the code encodes a payment order, never a guarantee. In Slovakia, the NOP notification provides that proof; in Czechia, you have to build it with your bank.
• Recalculate outgoing costs in Hungary and Slovakia: transaction taxes apply to debits, and therefore to payouts. Batching payouts reduces the number of taxable transactions.
• Handle disputes outside the card schemes: an A2A payment can’t be disputed through Visa or Mastercard. You need a written refund policy, a tested refund flow, and refund timelines communicated to customers.
• Keep cash in your operating plan in Hungary: since July 1, 2025, merchants with an online cash register must accept it.
• Align your POS software roadmap: Hungary’s e-receipt mandate is scheduled for September 1, 2026, and Slovakia’s cashless acceptance requirement applies from May 1, 2026. Both affect the same component.

The shift of volume to the instant rail shows up in Hungarian providers’ revenue. In Q3 2025, their payment revenue rose 17.0% year over year, compared with 8.1% for card acceptance revenue alone. Within that, interchange fees grew 10.2% while terminal-related fees fell 6.2%. Over the same period, the MNB reported a 39.2% increase in the share of fraud value attributable to psychological manipulation, a rise of 13.2 percentage points. In this type of fraud, the fraudster gets the payer to authorize the transaction: the payer completes strong customer authentication themselves, and the resulting credit transfer doesn’t give access to the dispute procedures available for card payments.