BLIK

Six Polish banks agreed in 2013 to build a common mobile payment system, and BLIK went live on 9 February 2015 after the National Bank of Poland had approved its operation in 2014. Polski Standard Płatności, a joint stock company in Warsaw, runs the system today, and its shareholders are Alior Bank, Bank Millennium, Erste Bank Polska, ING Bank Śląski, mBank, PKO Bank Polski and Mastercard. Erste Bank Polska is the former Santander Bank Polska, and Mastercard became the seventh shareholder in 2020 after a partnership that began in 2019.

The National Bank of Poland classified BLIK as a significant retail payment system in March 2023. On 9 September 2026 the central bank moved BLIK into the category of systemically important payment systems (in Polish), because BLIK had processed the largest number of payment orders of all Polish retail payment systems in four consecutive quarters. In 2025, Polski Standard Płatności reported revenue of PLN 489.5 million and a net profit of PLN 198.1 million.

A standard payment starts with a one-off six-digit code that stays valid for two minutes after the customer generates it in the banking app. The customer enters the code at the online checkout, on the shop terminal or at the ATM and then approves the amount in the app. With QR code payments the payer scans a code that the merchant shows, while with BLIK the payer carries the code from the bank app to the checkout. The money leaves the current account directly, which makes BLIK a form of pay by bank without any card number.

The partnership with Mastercard brought contactless payments at ordinary card terminals, and six large banks offered contactless BLIK on a broad scale from 2021. Contactless made up 48 percent of BLIK payments in stores in 2025, when 3.9 million users had switched the function on. PKO Bank Polski completed the first contactless BLIK payment on an iPhone on 30 July 2026, in a pilot inside its app for children.

Phone transfers, known as BLIK P2P, send money to another person who has registered a phone number for BLIK in a banking app. Users made 735.1 million such transfers in 2025, and 20.7 million people were registered for them at the end of June 2026. On 9 September 2026 an AI assistant in the Polish online shop Your KAYA bought a product with BLIK through PayU, in a pilot of agent-led payments within limits that the user had set in the banking app beforehand.

In 2025, users made 2.9 billion BLIK transactions worth PLN 441.5 billion, or EUR 104.9 billion, and active accounts grew to 20.7 million by the end of December. Online shops accounted for 1.4 billion of these payments and shop terminals for 704.5 million, while ATM withdrawals and deposits added another 79 million. Since its launch the system has handled a cumulative 10 billion transactions worth PLN 1.4 trillion.

In the first half of 2026, users made 1.6 billion transactions worth PLN 244.8 billion, an average of 8.7 million a day, and 21.6 million users were active at the end of June. Online payments made up 48.5 percent of all BLIK transactions in that period. Polski Standard Płatności puts the share of BLIK at more than 70 percent of all transactions in Polish e-commerce.

Polski Standard Płatności completed the purchase of the Slovak payment platform VIAMO in May 2023 after approval by the National Bank of Slovakia and renamed the company BLIK SK. Commercial BLIK payments started in Slovakia in September 2024 with Tatra banka as the first bank, and mBank SK followed as the second bank in September 2026. In Romania, the central bank authorized BLIK Romania S.A. on 1 October 2024 to operate the system, with online payments planned as the first phase.

BLIK joined the European Payments Alliance in May 2025, the group of national mobile payment services that also includes Bizum in Spain. On 12 November 2025, a customer of Santander Bank Polska received the first pilot transfer in euros from a user of MB WAY in Portugal over the SEPA Instant scheme. In May 2026, BLIK confirmed its interest in joining the interoperability project of the alliance members and the European Payments Initiative, the company behind the Wero wallet. Transfers between people across the connected apps are planned for 2026 and 2027, and payments in stores across the network are expected from 2027.

BLIK is a mobile payment system of Polish banks that lets customers pay from their current account through the app of their own bank. The customer generates a six-digit code in the app, enters it at the checkout, terminal or ATM and confirms the payment in the app, after which the bank debits the account.

A shop in Germany can accept payments from Polish customers through providers such as Stripe, which added BLIK to its dynamic payment methods for merchants in more than 30 countries in September 2026. Polski Standard Płatności has also worked with Adyen and PPRO since 2020 to bring the method to international online shops. The payer needs an account with a bank that offers BLIK, which banks in Poland and Slovakia do, and Revolut has offered BLIK to its customers in Poland since it added the method in November 2024.

Both systems move money straight from the bank account of the payer and work without a card number. A BLIK payment uses the six-digit code from the banking app at the checkout, while Wero users send money to a phone number or email address and pay online through their bank app or the Wero app. BLIK runs in złoty in Poland and in euros in Slovakia, and Wero runs in euros in Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg. Through the shared plans of EuroPA and EPI, users of both services are meant to send each other money across borders.

Merchants can charge recurring payments for subscriptions with BLIK, which eight banks supported at the end of 2025. In the first half of 2026 users made 3.6 million such payments, and more than 100 merchants, among them OpenAI and Allegro, offered them. BLIK Pay Later lets a customer pay for a purchase at a later date, and four banks offered this deferred payment at the end of 2025.