Cash on delivery as the default
Cash on delivery means the customer pays for an order when the courier hands it over, not at checkout. It is called ramburs in Romanian and наложен платеж in Bulgarian. It still accounts for most orders of physical goods in both countries. The collection flow has three steps. The merchant ships the parcel before being paid. The driver collects on delivery, in cash or by card on a mobile terminal. The courier then remits the funds a few days later. Collection therefore happens at the courier, outside the payment service provider’s chain.
Cash on delivery persists because couriers, consumers, and merchants have found a balance, not because the market lacks equipment. Romanian and Bulgarian couriers have built dense networks of lockers and pickup points with payment collection built in, and they pay merchants out quickly. Consumers get the right to refuse a parcel at the door, with no refund process and no bank delay. Merchants get higher conversion from new customers and rural shoppers, and they pay for it with a high parcel refusal rate.
| Criterion | Cash on delivery | Card or instant transfer at checkout |
|---|---|---|
| Who collects | The courier, on delivery | The PSP or acquirer, at checkout |
| Time to merchant payout | Courier payout after delivery, per contract | Standard acquirer cycle, D+1 to D+3 |
| Cost per order | Courier’s COD handling fee, on top of shipping | Merchant service charge; IFR interchange caps apply (EEA) |
| Refusals and returns | Parcel refused at the door: outbound and return shipping lost, stock tied up | Standard return after payment; refund to process |
| Fraud risk | Low on the payment, high on fake orders | CNP fraud, mitigated by strong customer authentication |
| Reconciliation | On the courier’s remittance statement, outside the card payment flow | On the acquirer batch and the matching transfer |
Bulgaria in the euro: what changed on January 1, 2026
On July 8, 2025, the Council of the European Union adopted the three legal acts clearing Bulgaria’s entry into the euro area: Decision (EU) 2025/1407; Regulation (EU) 2025/1408, which amends Regulation (EC) No 974/98; and Regulation (EU) 2025/1409, which sets the conversion rate. The lev was replaced at the irrevocable rate of BGN 1.95583 per EUR 1, exactly its central rate in the exchange rate mechanism. Bulgaria has been the 21st member of the euro area since January 1, 2026.
The switch continues a long history: Bulgaria had operated a currency board, at a fixed rate against the euro, for more than 25 years. About 70% of its public debt was already euro-denominated, and total debt stood at 23.8% of GDP in 2024, the second-lowest level in the EU. The country had run a budget surplus in 13 of the previous 27 years. The ECB, however, notes weak public support for the euro, driven by fears of price increases (ECB, Economic Bulletin, 2026).
BORICA: BISERA, blink, and Bcard
BORICA AD concentrates Bulgaria’s payment infrastructure in a single company. Owned by 19 banks, it handles retail clearing and the national card switch. It also manages ATMs and terminals, issuing, authorization, and fraud prevention. An integrator entering Bulgaria therefore deals with a single gateway rather than a fragmented market of technical operators. Connection timelines depend on BORICA’s processing windows and certifications.
| System | Operator | Topic | Status in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| RINGS | Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) | Real-time gross settlement in leva | Discontinued; flows moved to T2 |
| BISERA6 | BORICA AD | Clearing of customer transfers in leva, including budget and instant payments, up to BGN 999,999,999.99 | Discontinued January 1, 2026 |
| BISERA | BORICA AD | Customer transfers in euros under the SEPA schemes: SCT and SCT Inst | Live; the reference system |
| blink | BORICA AD | National instant payment program: P2P by mobile number, parking, transit, donations | Live |
| Bcard | BORICA AD | National card scheme, designed along SEPA Cards guidelines | Live |
| T2 / TIPS / T2S | Eurosystem | Central bank money settlement, pan-European instant payments, securities | Bulgaria connected since January 1, 2026 |
Instant payments in leva went live in BISERA6 in spring 2021 under the blink brand. The rail has grown fast since. In 2024, the last year before the euro, it processed 22.635 million transactions worth BGN 36.920 billion, up 102.1% in volume and 96.4% in value year over year. It then accounted for 20.36% of all lev transfers through BISERA6, up from 3.51% in 2022 (BORICA, 2025), and growth has continued.
Bcard is Bulgaria’s domestic card scheme, run by National Card and Payment Scheme. The BNB authorized it in 2016, building on the earlier Borica national card, and the first Bcard was issued in June 2018. The scheme claims acceptance at more than 5,470 ATMs and about 103,220 physical and virtual terminals at 43,730 merchants (National Card and Payment Scheme, accessed 2026). The brand is invisible from abroad. Any acquiring integration in Bulgaria should check whether Bcard falls within its contractual scope.
Romania: TRANSFOND, ReGIS, SENT, and RoPay
TRANSFOND S.A., owned by the National Bank of Romania (BNR) and commercial banks, operates all of the country’s retail interbank infrastructure. This mixed governance, with the regulator and the firms it regulates both holding shares in the operator, is rare in Europe. The BNR owns the RTGS system, which TRANSFOND operates along with the clearing house, the instant payment rail, and the mobile initiation layer. A company connecting in Romania therefore deals with a single technical counterpart.
| System | Operator | Since | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| ReGIS | BNR (operated by TRANSFOND S.A.) | 2005 | Real-time gross settlement in Romanian lei |
| SENT | TRANSFOND S.A. | 2005 | Bulk clearing house in RON and EUR; standard threshold of 50,000 lei |
| Plăți instant | TRANSFOND S.A. | 2019 | Instant transfer in lei, under 10 seconds, 24/7/365 |
| RoPay | TRANSFOND S.A. | rolled out 2024–2025 | National initiation layer on top of Plăți instant: QR code, deep link, NFC, phone alias |
| BLIK România | BLIK ROMANIA S.A. | authorized in October 2024 | Payment system for settling e-commerce transactions, capped at 50,000 lei |
RoPay is a national initiation layer on top of Plăți instant. It standardizes how an instant transfer is triggered in the banking apps that have adopted it, and it addresses the fragmentation of Romanian banking apps. A payment starts from a QR code shown at the checkout counter, a deep link on a website, an NFC tap, or the payee’s phone number used as an alias for their IBAN. CEC Bank and Libra Internet Bank launched the service first, in 2024, and the big banks followed in 2025: BCR, BRD, Banca Transilvania, and ING Bank România. The market-wide RoPay 2.0 scheme took effect on September 1, 2025. The model mirrors the approach of BLIK in Poland and qvik in Hungary.
In October 2024, the BNR board authorized the operation of the BLIK ROMANIA payment system, run by BLIK ROMANIA S.A. and based on the Polish standard from Polski Standard Płatności. The initial scope is e-commerce, with a cap of 50,000 lei per transaction. No payment system from another Member State had previously obtained a local operating license in Romania. Compliance teams should take note of this one-off case.
The rise of cards
Romania caught up on cards in five years, and the BNR’s payment indicators for December 2025 show how far. The country has 28.63 million active cards, up 10.07% in six months, of which 24.68 million offer cash withdrawal. The number of ATMs has risen to 11,136, payment terminals to 729,408, and EFTPOS points to 685,731. Terminals grew by more than 161,000 units over the half-year.
The value of Romanian electronic payments has overtaken ATM withdrawals for the first time. The indicator has limits: it measures the value flowing over electronic rails, not the share of everyday purchases paid by means other than cash. The two measures diverge sharply in a country where cash on delivery still dominates online shopping.
In Bulgaria, the installed base is older and the flow more concentrated: for most of the market, card authorization, switching, and terminal and ATM management run through BORICA. UniCredit Bulbank, DSK Bank, United Bulgarian Bank, Postbank, and Fibank connect to it or run their own stack. Visa and Mastercard dominate issuing. The domestic Bcard scheme holds a local acceptance niche, notably for public services.
- Check Bcard coverage in the Bulgarian acquiring contract: the brand does not appear in international checkout flows and can be missing without any warning.
- Distinguish terminals from EFTPOS points in Romanian statistics: the BNR publishes both series, and the gaps are hard to read if the definitions are mixed up.
- Plan for contactless and wallets: Google Pay and Apple Pay are established in both markets and tokenize on the international networks.
- Track installation lead times: in Romania, the law gives the acquirer 30 days, which gives a merchant rolling out terminals contractual leverage.
Accepting payments: acquirers, PSPs, and local fintechs
In Romania and Bulgaria, payment acceptance depends on acquirers, payment gateways, e-money institutions, and banks that are well established locally but rarely appear in European market overviews. Ignoring them is costly, for two reasons. They distribute the payment methods local consumers recognize, and cross-border acquiring through a single international provider leaves part of the sales on the table.
Revolut Bank is the newcomer that changed Romanian habits. Its Romanian branch has been operating since late November 2024, and it began moving customer accounts to Romanian IBANs in December 2024. It operates under the banking license issued by the Bank of Lithuania, passported across the EU, with notification to the BNR. Deposits are covered by the Lithuanian deposit guarantee scheme, up to €100,000.
What breaks and what it costs
The operational challenge in these two markets is accounting, not technology. A Romanian order paid on delivery generates revenue that shows up on a courier remittance statement, with its own payout schedule and fee, not in an acquirer batch or a card processing statement. A merchant whose reconciliation relies on the batch, transfer, and statement trio therefore faces a fourth source, outside the payment system and often missing from its ERP.
| Topic | Romania | Bulgaria | Where to fix it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash on delivery | Most online orders; paid out by the courier | Most online orders; same model | Courier contract: payout timing, fee, handling of refusals |
| Currency | Romanian leu (RON), not pegged to the euro | Euro since January 1, 2026; lev withdrawn | FX and pricing policy; review for Bulgaria |
| Instant | Two separate rails: Plăți instant in RON, SCT Inst in EUR | Single euro rail: BISERA and TIPS | Payment engine routing table |
| E-invoicing | RO e-Factura: B2B since July 1, 2024, B2C since January 1, 2025; upload to SPV, the tax portal, within 5 business days | No mandatory national equivalent on the same timeline | ERP and invoicing chain; CIUS-RO XML format based on EN 16931 |
| Cash | Law No. 70/2015: 5,000 lei per transaction between individuals since January 1, 2025; splitting prohibited | BGN 10,000 cap converted to €5,111.92 | In-store payment policy and till checks |
| Price display | Prices shown in lei | Dual lev/euro pricing mandatory from August 8, 2025, to August 8, 2026 | Product pages, labels, catalogs, ads with prices |
- Model parcel refusals as a separate cost line, including outbound shipping, return shipping, handling, and restocking.
- Reconcile four sources in Romania and Bulgaria: acquirer batches, bank transfers, card processing statements, and courier remittance statements.
- Treat RO e-Factura as a deadline constraint: invoices must reach SPV within five business days of issue, regardless of the payment collection cycle.
- Keep pre-2026 lev-denominated records: they must remain readable and convertible for disputes and audits.
- Check instant payment participation bank by bank: in Romania, Plăți instant and RoPay coverage was built one institution at a time.
Central banks and the road to 2027
The two central banks’ roles diverged on January 1, 2026. The Bulgarian National Bank, now a national central bank of the Eurosystem, completed its connection to all TARGET Services: T2 for gross settlement, TIPS for instant payments, and T2S for securities. Connection to the Eurosystem Collateral Management System followed, and the BNB shut down RINGS and revoked BORICA’s license to operate BISERA6. The National Bank of Romania keeps a national RTGS system and its own currency.
The ECB’s convergence report of June 24, 2026, assesses Romania against the euro adoption criteria. Romania fails the price stability criterion, with inflation well above the 2.7% reference value. It also fails the fiscal criterion: the deficit exceeded 3% of GDP in 2025, under an excessive deficit procedure open since 2020 whose correction deadline has been pushed back to 2030. The long-term interest rate stands at 6.7%, against a reference value of 5.1%. National legislation is not fully compatible. Romania also does not participate in ERM II, the exchange rate mechanism that is a mandatory first step.
- Bulgaria: BORICA expects more than 4 million blink transfers in 2026, worth over €600 million (BORICA, January 2026). The rail is young and adoption is growing fast.
- Romania: RoPay and its 2.0 scheme focus the market’s efforts on account-to-account initiation, with the stated goal of competing with cards at the point of sale and in e-commerce.
- Both: cash on delivery is declining without disappearing, and its future depends more on couriers and return logistics than on payment methods themselves.
- Missing in both markets: Wero and the EuroPA alliance have not launched there yet, which leaves room for national standards and BLIK’s regional expansion.