BLIK Explained: How Poland Built Its Own A2A Payment System

In 2025, Poles made 2.9 billion BLIK transactions worth a total of PLN 441.5 billion, or nearly EUR 105 billion. In a country of 38 million people, we are talking about close to 21 million active users, and every second transaction in Polish e-commerce is a BLIK payment. This is not a story about "another fintech app". This is a story about how a consortium of six banks built infrastructure that, over the course of a decade, ate a substantial share of a market normally dominated by Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, and is now going abroad and becoming one of the pieces of the European puzzle against American hegemony in payments.

Let's go back to 2009-2012. The Polish banking market already has mobile apps, but they are more tools for checking account balances than real payment channels. Around the banks circle the telecoms, who together with Visa and Mastercard want to build payment systems based on SIM cards. PKO BP even initially tries to run such a project with one of the telecoms, working name "Mandaryna". It consumes some time and money, and is eventually shelved. This is where PKO BP and its then-CEO Zbigniew Jagiello enter the story. Zbigniew Jagiello, who took the helm of the bank in 2009, had one principle he repeated at every opportunity: "a modern bank should be a technology company with a banking license". Among Polish bank CEOs there was also a recurring observation that an effective mobile payment system cannot be available only to customers of one bank. This thinking, partly drawn from international banking experience, was brought to the table by, among others, Cezary Stypulkowski, CEO of mBank, who had previously led Bank Handlowy and PZU, worked in the London office of J.P. Morgan, and over his career sat on the international advisory boards of Deutsche Bank and INSEAD. Zbigniew Jagiello himself, in later interviews, points to a specific event that convinced him that Poland needed one common standard: a trip to Turkey back in his previous professional life. He walks into a shop, and the seller asks where he has his account, and then lays out on the counter five different terminals, one for each of the large Turkish banks. The fragmentation of payment schemes in Turkey was not a problem in Poland, but Zbigniew Jagiello had the thought that this is exactly how it would end up in Poland if every bank kept developing its own technology instead of cooperating. The second key figure on the PKO BP side was Piotr Alicki, then deputy CEO of the bank overseeing IT and Operations (since November 2010). It was under his leadership that the technological foundation of IKO and, by extension, BLIK was built. Piotr Alicki had decades of experience in major banking IT projects, including the IT merger of the Pekao banking group and the integration of Inteligo into PKO BP systems. He sat on the Polish Payment System Council at NBP, on the Supervisory Board of KIR (chairing it from 2005-2010), and was a member of the Board of Directors of Visa Europe (2011-2015). If Zbigniew Jagiello was the visionary and political-strategic architect of the inter-bank agreement, Piotr Alicki was the operational and technical godfather of BLIK, the man who took the concept to production rollout. A symbolic closure of this story: in November 2016 Piotr Alicki took the position of CEO of KIR, the operator of the clearing infrastructure on which BLIK settles. The green light for the IKO project was given at the turn of 2011 and 2012, long before the public debut. Around the same time, key people who would lead the initiative joined PKO BP: Wojciech R. Bolanowski, MD PhD as director of the Electronic Banking Division (from April 2011) and Michal Macierzynski, PhD as director of the newly formed Bureau of Innovation (from May 2010). Wojciech Bolanowski brought experience from mBank, which he co-built in 2000 with Slawomir Lachowski (as a curiosity, he was previously a doctor in a paediatric oncology ward). Michal Macierzynski was responsible for the concept and launch of the IKO project. After about a year of preparation, the IKO app publicly launches in March 2013, presented in person by Wojciech Bolanowski. The entire technological core of BLIK is directly the solution developed at PKO BP for IKO: the six-digit code, in-app authorization, settlement through banking infrastructure. It's worth pausing for a moment to consider the context in which IKO was born. In 2012-2013 a real mobile payments standard war was raging in Poland. On one side, banks each with their own idea (PKO BP with IKO, Bank Pekao SA with PeoPay, six banks in PSP soon to launch BLIK). On another side, telecoms pushing SIM-card-based systems. And on yet another side, an unexpected player: retail chains, led by Biedronka (Poland's largest grocery chain). The absence of Bank Pekao from the PSP founders is a separate curiosity. Pekao was then run by Luigi Lovaglio, who had previously in his career been Zbigniew Jagiello's superior. According to Zbigniew Jagiello's own account, Luigi Lovaglio was not able to accept the situation in which his former subordinate was running a competing bank, doing it better, and coming with a proposal for a joint project. Pekao refused to join PSP and decided to develop its own solution, PeoPay, which for a moment actually was the market leader thanks to integration with Biedronka. Biedronka deserves a separate paragraph here, because it was largely Biedronka that got Poles used to cashless payments. For years the chain accepted only cash, arguing that interchange fees were too high and passing them on to customers would mean a price hike. On 21 October 2013, Biedronka launched its own mobile payments system iKasa, developed with ICP Polska, available to customers of Alior Bank, Getin Bank and Bank Pekao (via PeoPay). At that time the chain had the largest Polish grocery footprint, so it theoretically had the strongest distribution leverage. Only in 2014 were interchange rates harmonized in the EU, which opened Biedronka to accepting payment cards (POS terminals appeared in stores in June 2014). In 2012 and 2013 it was not at all clear which standard would win. iKasa operated in Biedronka until the end of 2017, eventually withdrawn after card and BLIK acceptance was introduced. PeoPay at Pekao operated in parallel for several more years, until in 2018 the bank integrated with BLIK. Instead of keeping the technology exclusive to PKO BP, Zbigniew Jagiello opens it up to other banks. He visits the CEOs of the largest banks operating in Poland with a proposal to create a common standard. On 13 January 2014, PKO BP together with five other institutions (Alior, Bank Millennium, Bank Zachodni WBK, ING Bank Slaski, mBank) founds Polski Standard Platnosci (PSP). The six founding banks, then informally referred to as the Big Six, jointly controlled 50% of the Polish deposit market and served around 16 million accounts. The first CEO of PSP was Adam Malicki, a veteran of the Polish payments market (Pekao, eCard, Inteligo, eService, PKO BP). PKO BP contributed to the venture the ready technology developed for IKO as an in-kind contribution, representing 100% of PSP's initial value. Those shares had to be divided between six entities. Advisory firms proposed a division "by merit" (number of clients, demographic structure), but Zbigniew Jagiello came up with a different idea. At one of the meetings, he proposed that the division should be decided by a coin toss. No one had a coin except the oldest one in the room, Boguslaw Kott of Bank Millennium, then chairman of its supervisory board. The toss produced an equal split, one sixth per founder, which was accepted by everyone. The smallest banks risked exactly as much in this split as the largest ones, which cemented the balance of power. Krajowa Izba Rozliczeniowa (KIR), Poland's national clearing house, was also invited to cooperate, a natural candidate, because all inter-bank settlements in Poland flow through KIR's infrastructure. According to Zbigniew Jagiello's account, KIR initially refused, and the decision turned out to be costly for the then-CEO of KIR, who soon parted ways with his position. KIR later joined the BLIK project, and today is the operator of the clearing infrastructure on which BLIK transactions settle (Elixir, Express Elixir). It is also worth noting the context in which BLIK was created: few people believed in it. Zbigniew Jagiello himself admits in interviews that both the board of PKO BP and the National Bank of Poland approached the project with a neutral detachment along the lines of "go ahead, it probably won't work, but try". Permission to "carry out" the developed technology into a joint venture with the competition was possible precisely because no one treated this as a business revolution in the making. Already during the negotiations between banks, an interesting branding decision emerged. Not everyone was convinced the new system needed a new name. Cezary Stypulkowski, then CEO of mBank, suggested staying with the "IKO" name, arguing that it was already known and promoted, so why start marketing from scratch. Ultimately the proposal to create a fresh, neutral brand, unbound to any specific bank, prevailed. The name "BLIK" was proposed by Warsaw branding agency White Cat Studio, specifically by designer Michal Lojewski (who sadly passed away in September 2025) supported by Tomasz Marszall, then Marketing Director at PKO BP (2010-2015, later head of marketing at TVN Media). An onomatopoeic word evoking "blisko" (close), "link" and "click", short and easy to pronounce even for foreigners. White Cat Studio also designed BLIK's full visual identity. PSP has actively managed intellectual property around the brand from day one. Already on 1 July 2015, less than five months after BLIK's commercial launch, the company filed the "blik" trademark with EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office) in Alicante. The protection remains in force, with the next renewal due on 1 July 2035. The EUIPO database holds nine trademarks registered by PSP, plus additional word-mark and figurative-mark filings at the Polish Patent Office, including "blik PLACE POZNIEJ" (BLIK Pay Later) and "blik ZYJ BARDZIEJ!" (BLIK Live More!). These seemingly dry legal details have concrete business consequences in the payments ecosystem: a well-protected trademark makes it easier to distinguish authentic service from imitation attempts (and there are plenty of these in online payments, from fake checkout pages impersonating BLIK to phishing campaigns abusing the logo). Active brand management by PSP shows that the trademark here is a foundation of trust for the entire ecosystem, not just visual decoration. The first production BLIK ATM withdrawal took place on 8 November 2014 in Warsaw, at 23:07. It was an ATM withdrawal made by a small group of internal participants in a "friends & family" mode, testing the system in production conditions before commercial launch. This mode lasted about three months. On 9 February 2015, PSP, through Adam Malicki, announced the official commercial launch of BLIK, the moment when the service became available to customers of the six founding banks. During the friends & family phase, BLIK had already processed thousands of production transactions, making the February launch not so much "the first deployment" as the formal opening of the system to the mass market. Zbigniew Jagiello's decision to hand over the technology to a joint venture was counterintuitive but turned out to be strategic genius. A common standard with guaranteed independence (PSP was not controlled by any single bank) meant that competition stopped being an obstacle. Every bank wanted to be inside, because being outside meant falling behind. Zbigniew Jagiello and Piotr Alicki are the two most prominent figures in this story, but the group of creators was much wider. On the PKO BP side, IKO's and BLIK's creation also involved, besides Wojciech Bolanowski and Michal Macierzynski, Robert Trentowski, Adam Marciniak (later deputy CEO for IT) and Jakub Papierski (deputy CEO for corporate and investment banking). Within the inter-bank partnership itself, key roles were played by the CEOs and deputy CEOs of the five other founding banks. This was not a one-person vision, but a coordinated effort of the entire Polish banking industry.

Today, the first association with BLIK is e-commerce, but that is not where BLIK started. The story unfolds in three waves. First wave, 2013-2016: ATMs. The first real use case was cardless cash withdrawal. From March 2013, PKO BP allowed IKO users to withdraw cash with a code from its own ATMs, and in July 2015 the key player joined: Euronet, with 11 thousand machines, more than half of the Polish ATM market. In 2015 PKO BP openly stated that "ATM withdrawals using a BLIK code are the most popular type of transaction" among IKO users. Already in October 2015, P2P transfers to a phone number (BLIK to phone) were introduced, and in December 2015 mPOS BLIK, allowing merchants to accept payments directly on their smartphone without a traditional terminal. The first year of BLIK was "only" about 2.5 million transactions, but the infrastructure was already broad. Second wave, 2016-2019: POS terminals. The second breakthrough was reaching agreement with the largest POS terminal acquirers. The key player was eService, the largest Polish acquirer serving terminals in shops, restaurants and service points. BLIK made it into physical shops in the "enter the code on the terminal" version. This was still not explosive growth, but the phase built something much more important: merchant-side acceptance. It's worth explaining here the BLIK growth strategy, which turned out to be its real key to success: growth through integration. BLIK didn't walk from shop to shop, from petrol station to petrol station. One contract with eService was enough to appear in all Shell and Orlen terminals in Poland at once. One contract with each of the main online payment gateways (PayU, Przelewy24, Tpay, Paynow) gave immediate access to thousands of online stores. Every shop, pharmacy and petrol station started having BLIK built into the terminal automatically, without any negotiation effort on BLIK's side. In March 2019, BLIK recurring payments launched (initially at ING Bank Slaski and Bank Pekao), allowing subscription payments to telecom operators and insurers without manual confirmation of each transaction. Third wave, 2019-present: the e-commerce boom. Only with the dynamic growth of Polish e-commerce, fueled by the pandemic, did the explosion happen. In 2019, the number of BLIK online transactions exceeded, for the first time, the number of card transactions online in Poland (in Q3, 40 million BLIK versus 28 million cards). Allegro, Empik, Zalando, every large shop added BLIK, every payment processor put it in the checkout. The pandemic accelerated everything, and BLIK turned out to be the simplest path of migration from cash to online. 2020 was the first year in which BLIK broke even, after 5 years of investment by the founding banks. In the background, further integrations were happening. In October 2019 PSP entered a strategic partnership with Mastercard (formally a shareholder from April 2020 as the seventh, with an equal share), which enabled the launch of BLIK Contactless in November 2021 (commercially in 6 banks). Only contactless BLIK-C transactions are technically handled by Mastercard, the rest still go through PSP infrastructure. According to Zbigniew Jagiello, both Visa and Mastercard were invited to talks, but the second won for a specific reason: the then-CEO of Mastercard Ajay Banga (today President of the World Bank, since June 2023) came to the meetings in person. The presence of the company's boss at negotiations guaranteed fast and irreversible decisions, which Visa, represented by regional staff, was not able to offer. In 2024 came BLIK Pay Later (BNPL with 30-day deferral). November 2024 saw the transformation of PSP from a limited liability company into a joint-stock company. Ten years later BLIK means 180 million transactions per month (an average of 6.6 million daily in 2024), 97% brand awareness among Poles, and a position where in March 2023 the National Bank of Poland officially classified it as a "systemically important retail payment system". Zbigniew Jagiello left PKO BP in 2021 after 12 years as CEO, but today he is an independent member of the PSP Supervisory Board. He is also the one who, as CEO of PKO BP, brought Mastercard into BLIK's shareholder structure.

On 28 July 2026, while I was gathering material for this article, something happened at PSP that is worth treating as a natural closing of one chapter and the opening of another. Dariusz Mazurkiewicz submitted his resignation to the Supervisory Board as CEO of Polski Standard Platnosci, after more than 11.5 years with the company, 9 of them at its helm. It's worth realizing the scale of that era. Dariusz Mazurkiewicz joined BLIK in February 2015, a few weeks after commercial launch, as a deputy CEO responsible for product. Before that, for four years (2010-2014) he was CEO of SkyCash, one of the first Polish companies with real experience in mobile consumer payments. This is biographically important: when in June 2017 he took the PSP CEO seat, replacing Grzegorz Dlugosz, he brought to the board a product mindset (user and convenience), not a banking one. Many commentators consider this a key ownership decision. BLIK, led by the former founder of SkyCash, stopped being treated as a technology project of six banks and became a consumer product. During Dariusz Mazurkiewicz's tenure (June 2017 to July 2026) BLIK grew from around 33 million transactions per year to 2.9 billion in 2025. That is growth of nearly two orders of magnitude in 8 years. During this period all the strategic moves that defined today's BLIK position happened: the Mastercard partnership (2019) and Mastercard's entry as the seventh shareholder (2020), the launch of BLIK Contactless (2021), the launch of BLIK Pay Later (2024), the transformation of PSP into a joint-stock company (November 2024), the acquisition of Slovakia's VIAMO and BLIK's entry into Slovakia (2022-2024), the BLIK Romania authorization (2024), and the first pilot cross-border transactions with Bizum and MB Way under EuroPA (2025). Dariusz Mazurkiewicz himself, in his farewell statement, emphasized that BLIK "was never the story of one person", but the result of teamwork, shareholders, banks, partners, regulators. It is worth noting the narrative echo of what Zbigniew Jagiello wrote in his comment to an earlier version of this article ("BLIK is not the success story of a single institution"). This line of thinking, that BLIK is a network of relationships rather than one organization, is another shared element between the original visionary and his longest-serving operational leader. This changing of the guard raises several serious questions. First, the question of the successor. PSP has not yet announced a name. The new CEO will take over the company at a moment when the domestic market is largely saturated (19.5 million active monthly users out of around 22 million potential), and growth must come from three directions: international expansion (Slovakia, Romania, potentially further CEE markets), new products (BNPL, recurring payments, full interoperability with EuroPA/EPI), and pricing optimization against a mature client base. That is a harder set of challenges than building from scratch. Second, the question of the stock exchange. Alongside the news of Dariusz Mazurkiewicz's departure came a Bloomberg report that PSP's shareholders are considering the case for a BLIK IPO on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. This is a topic that has been floating in market speculation for years, but has never been so concretely stated at the communication level. A BLIK IPO would be one of the largest debuts in the history of the Warsaw parquet, a company with a 45% net margin, double-digit annual growth, and a business model that all of Europe is starting to copy. It would also be an interesting test for the appetite of Polish institutional investors for fintech, in a country where most recent debuts have been oil, energy and industrial companies. Third, the question of the ownership structure. Six founding banks plus Mastercard is a model that has served excellently at the standard-building stage. An IPO means opening the shareholding to funds and retail investors, which changes the decision-making calculus in the company. What disappears then is the potential ease of long-term investment decisions "at the expense" of short-term profitability, because the market pressure of quarterly results appears. That is good from a financial discipline perspective, but limiting for strategic moves of the kind made in the last 5 years. Who stays. The Chairman of the PSP Supervisory Board is Szymon Midera, the current CEO of PKO BP. In his comment on Dariusz Mazurkiewicz's departure, he emphasized that "BLIK is a solution commonly used by millions of customers and a key player in the payment market". PKO BP remains the largest single shareholder and the largest BLIK issuer bank in Poland, so Szymon Midera's role in this transformation will be crucial. On the board also sits Zbigniew Jagiello as an independent member, providing continuity between the founding era and the one to come. Dariusz Mazurkiewicz has not revealed where he is going next. In the Polish fintech ecosystem, a person with his experience (former CEO of SkyCash, 9 years running BLIK, knowledge of the CEE market, relationship with Mastercard, product expansion) is one of the most respected executive profiles. The market will expect either a very large step (a European payments player, potentially a role in EuroPA/EPI) or a return to entrepreneurship (a new fintech). The end of Dariusz Mazurkiewicz's era is a good moment to observe how an organization built more on a network of relationships than on one figure behaves. BLIK now has what it didn't have in 2017, when Dariusz Mazurkiewicz took the position: mature infrastructure, a dominant market position and international legitimacy. It also has challenges that didn't exist then: domestic saturation, pan-European competition (EuroPA/EPI, Wero), and the question of whether it remains a Polish story or becomes a European one.

BLIK is not a single product but a portfolio: Online payments (e-commerce). 1.4 billion transactions in 2025, PLN 219 billion turnover, average basket PLN 158. The core of BLIK's business, though historically the third channel to gain traction. P2P transfers (BLIK to phone). You enter a friend's phone number, they receive the transfer in seconds. Functional equivalent of Bizum in Spain or Swish in Sweden. 735 million transactions in 2025, an average of 2 million transfers a day. These transactions settle through Express Elixir, Poland's instant inter-bank transfer system operated by KIR. In-store payments (POS). The traditional code-on-terminal (rarely used) and BLIK Contactless, a phone-tapped-to-terminal payment competing with Apple Pay and Google Pay. In 2025 nearly half of in-store BLIK transactions were contactless. This is the fastest-growing segment. It also works on Mastercard terminals around the world, thanks to the Mastercard partnership. Deferred and recurring payments. Pay Later (30-day deferral, available at three banks, 440% year-on-year growth in 2025) and Recurring Payments for subscriptions and auto-top-up. Pay Later is an area where BLIK grows cautiously, while global BNPL players (Klarna, Afterpay, PayPo) grow more aggressively. Public sector payments. Since 2023, thanks to the special role of Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK) as acquirer for the public finance sector, you can pay PIT (personal income tax: PIT-28, PIT-36, PIT-37, PIT-38, PIT-39) in the e-Tax Office portal and local taxes in many Polish cities via BLIK.

In the center sits Polski Standard Platnosci (PSP), an independent company whose servers are the brain of the system. They manage the life cycle of every transaction, generate codes, run authorization queues. The system works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, except for scheduled maintenance windows. The transaction queue is handled First In First Out, meaning the first transaction to enter the system is the first to be executed. Around this brain sits a four-layer infrastructure: The bank issuing the mobile app to the customer, in BLIK regulation jargon called the "issuer". It decides whether the customer can afford the transaction and what limit they have; it receives from PSP the request to generate a code and returns it to the user. The acquirer, a merchant-facing intermediary. PayU, Przelewy24, Paynow, Tpay, Autopay, Cashbill, but also BGK for the public sector and global players like Adyen and PPRO handling cross-border e-commerce. The acquirer collects payments from customers and settles with the merchant. The merchant, which does not integrate directly with BLIK, only with one of the acquirers. KIR and NBP as the clearing infrastructure underneath. Standard BLIK transactions settle through the Elixir system run by KIR, P2P transactions through Express Elixir (instant), and high-value transactions through SORBNET3 (which replaced SORBNET2 in September 2025) operated directly by NBP. Everything in Polish zloty, with the settlement session ending at 24:00 each day. This is a significant difference from classic card networks. BLIK is not "another payment network" like Visa. Every BLIK transaction is actually a movement of funds between accounts in Polish banks, through Polish clearing infrastructure. This makes BLIK an A2A (account-to-account) system, not a card system. Crucial for understanding the economics of the system: merchants do not pay PSP directly. PSP's revenue comes from transaction fees paid by banks (issuers) and acquirers. The acquirer in turn charges a commission from the merchant, in which the fee to PSP is usually embedded. The merchant negotiates with the acquirer, not with BLIK. This simplifies the business model from the perspective of a small merchant, but complicates it from a regulatory perspective. The scale of this economy is substantial. According to Zbigniew Jagiello himself, 85% of PSP's revenue comes from transaction fees, and the company's net margin is 45%, placing BLIK in the top tier of profitability in the financial sector, comparable to Visa, Mastercard and top fintech platforms. The key to this profitability is the fact that the founding banks, instead of paying commissions to American card networks, keep them within their own ecosystem. They pay themselves for the use of the payment highway they collectively own.

The most popular scenario, a redirect to the BLIK page, handles over 70% of e-commerce volume. You choose BLIK as your payment method in the shop. The shop hands you off to its acquirer, who prepares a packet with transaction parameters (amount, description, shop identity, timestamp, digital signature verifying authenticity) and redirects your browser to the BLIK page. You see a form asking for the 6-digit code. You open your bank app, generate a code (the bank asks PSP servers for a new code, and PSP remembers it with your session identifier), enter it on the shop page, click "confirm". The BLIK page sends the query to PSP servers. PSP immediately asks your bank: "is this your customer, can this person afford this amount, do they confirm?". The bank opens the app on your phone and shows the "confirm payment: PLN 47 to shop.pl" screen. You click yes, enter your PIN or use biometrics. The bank replies to PSP with "confirmed". From the moment of authorization in the bank app, the order is irrevocable, the BLIK regulations state this explicitly. You cannot "undo" a transaction even if you realize a second later that you got the shop wrong. The only path is a refund, which is a separate transaction. PSP sends two messages in parallel. The first goes to the BLIK page, which shows you a success and redirects you back to the shop. The second, more important one, goes directly to the acquirer with status information. The acquirer notifies the shop, the shop shows "thank you for your purchase". The whole process typically takes 5-15 seconds. Clever safeguard: the notification to the acquirer goes through two independent channels, one through your browser, the other directly from PSP's server to the acquirer's server. If your laptop dies or WiFi cuts out, the second channel will deliver the information anyway. If the acquirer doesn't acknowledge, PSP retries again and again: 15 seconds, 30, a minute, two, up to an hour between attempts. Infrastructure designed with the assumption "the world is falling apart, we keep working".

It's not trivial. PSP requires significantly more than "sign a contract and roll out an integration": Capitalization and security deposit. Every acquirer must pay into a dedicated PSP account a security deposit of at least PLN 400 thousand, and its actual amount depends on the transaction volume the acquirer handles. PSP verifies monthly whether the deposit is adequate for the turnover. The deposit secures receivables to issuers (banks) in case the acquirer defaults on its obligations. Technical integration. The acquirer must build a full set of interfaces to handle transaction initiation, status notifications, refunds, partial corrections and technical cancellations. This is typically 3-6 months of a dev team's work, plus compliance testing. PSP certification. A multi-stage process in which PSP verifies whether the acquirer's implementation correctly handles a dozen or so different scenarios: standard transaction, timeout-error transaction, partial correction, technical cancellation, full refund, edge cases. Cryptographic key exchange. PSP issues to the acquirer individual certificates for two-way authentication of communication and for signing each message with a digital seal. Ongoing compliance. The acquirer must report to PSP every outage, suspected unauthorized transactions (PSP reports them to NBP), handle complaints, and maintain minimum SLAs for the availability of its systems. For this reason, most smaller online shops do not integrate with BLIK directly, but use ready-made solutions from acquirers like PayU or Przelewy24, who have already borne these costs and amortize them across thousands of merchants. For a mid-size shop, "from scratch" integration with PSP is simply not economically justified.

On the user side. The code is valid only 2 minutes and only once. Every transaction requires a separate confirmation in the bank app, authorized with PIN or biometrics. Even if someone steals your code, they still need to physically have your unlocked phone. This is "second channel confirmation" in its pure form, significantly more resistant than the SMS used in 3D Secure. On the integrator side. Every communication between an acquirer and PSP servers is mutually authenticated, plus every message carries a digital seal confirming authenticity. In practice, the main BLIK-related threats are not technical but social engineering. Classic "BLIK on OLX for sale": the scammer asks the victim to generate a code and pay for a supposedly purchased item, in the meantime quickly initiating a transaction on their own side, and the victim confirms, thinking that this is for their purchase. The scale of the problem is significant: according to research cited by Zbigniew Jagiello, 37% of Polish BLIK users have encountered an attempted scam, and 23% of that group actually became victims. BLIK and the banks try to fight this through warnings in the apps (since 2023 every confirmation screen very clearly shows who the recipient is), but this is a user-layer problem, not a system-layer one.

Poland is not alone in this game. Map of European "local heroes of mobile payments": - Spain: Bizum. Over 30 million users (more than half the population), 3.4 million transfers per day. BLIK's closest cousin. - Sweden: Swish. 85% of adult Swedes use it. Launched in 2012, one year before BLIK. - Netherlands: iDEAL. 70% share of Dutch e-commerce. Fully acquired by EPI, migration to Wero in progress, finalization by 2027. - Portugal: MB Way. Dominance in Portuguese e-commerce and P2P. - Germany/France/Belgium/Luxembourg: Wero. Player launched in 2024 by the European Payments Initiative (EPI), a company founded by 16 European banks and payment service providers. Wero's emergence coincided with the formal phase-out of Germany's Giropay; France's Paylib was migrated to Wero; while Belgium/Luxembourg's Payconiq and the Netherlands' iDEAL were fully acquired by EPI (Payconiq migration in Luxembourg planned for 2026, iDEAL in the Netherlands by 2027). 53 million users at the start of 2026, aggressive expansion. Wero is no longer mainly a P2P service: in Germany it has handled e-commerce payments since the end of 2025, with rollout in France and Belgium throughout 2026, and in-store payments in development. All of these systems share one trait: they are A2A, based on SEPA Instant real-time transfers. And all have local dominance but historically could not work cross-border.

The European Commission and the ECB have had one obsession for years: decoupling European payments from American infrastructure. Visa and Mastercard together process roughly 24 trillion dollars annually, and every transaction generates a data trail leaving European jurisdiction. Brussels treats this as a strategic vulnerability comparable to energy dependence. In December 2023 Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain) and SIBS/MB Way (Portugal) sign a letter of intent creating the EuroPA Alliance (European Payments Alliance), an initiative for interoperability of mobile payment systems. In November 2024 the alliance formally launches operationally with the first live demonstration transaction during Web Summit in Lisbon, connecting the three founders. Actual interoperability for users in four countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Andorra) rolls out from March 2025. In the first year 6 million euros were transferred cross-border without a marketing campaign, showing that demand for such solutions exists. In 2025 further members join EuroPA: Vipps MobilePay (Scandinavia), BLIK (Poland) and IRIS (Greece). Their integration with the shared infrastructure is gradual. On 23 June 2025 EuroPA and the European Payments Initiative (EPI, operator of Wero) announce joint cooperation, and on 1 September 2025 they confirm the plan to build a central interoperability hub. On 2 February 2026 the formal move happens: Bancomat, Bizum, SIBS-MB Way, Vipps MobilePay (members of EuroPA) and EPI sign a memorandum of understanding on interoperability of pan-European payment solutions. This is not a brand merger, but the creation of a central hub, a technical layer that will allow individual systems (Bizum, MB Way, Wero, Vipps and others) to exchange payments mutually while preserving their own brands and interfaces. The plan is to roll out cross-border P2P in 2026 and e-commerce + POS in 2027. The combined network covers approximately 130 million users in 13 countries, roughly 72% of the EU and Norway population: Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden. Importantly, BLIK is not among the signatories of the February memorandum, despite being a member of the EuroPA Alliance since 2025. Poland is for now outside the first wave of pan-European interoperability, which raises the question of how soon Polish users will actually gain access to BLIK payments at German, French or Spanish merchants. The initiative is open, however, and BLIK can join in a later phase. In 2025 BLIK conducted the first pilot cross-border transactions with Spain's Bizum (from PKO BP) and Portugal's MB Way under EuroPA. A Polish customer sent euros to a Spaniard, who received it in his Bizum. A few seconds, no SWIFT, no PLN 30 fees. If EuroPA + EPI form a real pan-European A2A network, then for the first time in history Europe will have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard, running on public infrastructure (SEPA Instant), under European regulator oversight, with data staying in Europe.

August 2022: PSP signs an agreement to acquire 100% of Slovak company VIAMO, a P2P and business payments provider. May 2023: after approval by the National Bank of Slovakia, the acquisition is finalized, the company is renamed to BLIK SK a.s. September 2024: Tatra Banka in Slovakia makes BLIK available to its customers. The first real BLIK rollout outside Poland from a consumer perspective. Accepting merchants include Reserved, Sinsay, eobuwie, Hebe, Muziker, Tous. Plan for 2026: mBank Slovakia will also make BLIK available. October 2024: BLIK Romania S.A. receives authorization from the National Bank of Romania. Launch is expected in the coming quarters. A less-known episode: in 2019 PSP licensed BLIK technology to DXC Technology, which deployed it in several banks in the United Arab Emirates. This shows that BLIK technology is subject to international licensing, independent of the BLIK brand's expansion under its own name. The then-CEO of PSP Dariusz Mazurkiewicz (until July 2026) in a February 2026 interview articulated the goal as follows: to show that "Poland was not a one-off, but a model that scales to other countries". The Mastercard shareholding in PSP since 2020 supports the expansion.

Strengths. BLIK is a portfolio, not a single service: e-commerce, P2P, contactless POS, BNPL, recurring, public sector payments. Bizum and Swish are mainly P2P. Wero started as P2P but since the end of 2025 has handled e-commerce in Germany, with France and Belgium being rolled out. BLIK was designed from the start as a versatile platform with e-commerce at the core of its offering. Plus all Polish banks are in one system, unique in European scale. Weaknesses. No pre-authorization: the classic mechanism "block PLN 100, take PLN 30 after parking" does not exist in BLIK. No global acceptance: a Polish customer cannot pay with BLIK on Amazon, Booking or in the Apple Store (with the exception of contactless BLIK-C, which works on Mastercard terminals). BLIK Contactless is still Android-only, the lack of an iOS version is an important gap considering that Apple Pay fully controls contactless payments on iPhones. BLIK's stack is based on older technologies from a decade ago, so most smaller acquirers choose the path of "let's plug into PayU/Przelewy24, they have BLIK underneath" instead of integrating with PSP directly.

BLIK shows that you can build a local payment system that, after a decade, processes 2.9 billion transactions annually and becomes one of the more serious retail payment infrastructures in Europe. It was done by bankers, not startups. Without VC, without flashy marketing campaigns. One common standard, six banks, ten years of work. Zbigniew Jagiello himself, in a comment on this story, distanced himself from the "one bank built BLIK" narrative. He listed a long roster of people directly involved in its creation: Piotr Alicki, Robert Trentowski, Adam Marciniak, Michal Macierzynski, Jakub Papierski and many others on the PKO BP side, plus the teams of the other founding banks. In the context of European payment sovereignty, BLIK shows something non-obvious: local A2A can be a real alternative to global card networks if it has sufficient scale and interoperability. EuroPA + EPI is an attempt to extend this model to all of Europe. Will it succeed? The history of European payment alliances doesn't inspire optimism, but this time several things exist that didn't before: SEPA Instant as base infrastructure, Instant Payments Regulation as compulsion, political determination of regulators, and finally successful patterns like BLIK proving that this is feasible. For anyone building fintech in Europe, BLIK and its cousins are no longer ignorable. Cards are no longer the only option. The question isn't "will A2A win", but "how fast" and "who specifically wins in our segment".