Polish Blik to launch services in Romania, later this year

BLIK is the mobile payment service most frequently and most willingly used by more than 10 million bank customers in Poland who use banking apps.

According to information obtained by cashless.pl, the beginning of the long-announced international expansion of Blik is approaching. The Polish fintech is holding advanced talks on this matter in Romania.

Appropriate recommendations are currently being prepared by the Romanian Association of Banks (equivalent of the Polish Bank Association), on the basis of which Romanian institutions will be able to make Blik available to their clients.

Work related to obtaining appropriate permissions is also underway. Sources of cashless.pl report that the first Romanian banks may implement Blik as early as this year.

Polski Standard Płatności (Blik’s operator) data shows that Blik is already used by more than 10 million bank customers in Poland (almost 5.5 million active users were recorded at the second quarter of 2020). So the growth opportunities on the domestic market are still large, because the number of customers using mobile banking in Poland reaches 20 million.

Potentially, in terms of the number of customers Blik can grow here by another 100 percent. But the customer base in Poland will be exhausted sooner or later, so the development abroad is needed if the representatives of Blik want to grow a unicorn. When Mastercard took over part of the shares in PSP a few years ago, it paid over PLN 83 million for them, which made it possible to value the Blik operator at around PLN 600 million.

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BLIK is the payment service most frequently and most willingly used by Poles who use banking apps.  Also, BLIK is currently the strongest brand in the modern payments category in Poland.

BLIK is the only payment system that provides POS and e-commerce payment capabilities under a single brand, together with the transfers to a phone and ATM withdrawals – none of the brands on the Polish market integrate these functions.

The ability to use BLIK in mobile banking apps is currently available to more than 90% of all customers of domestic financial institutions. Polski Standard Płatności (Polish Payment System – PPS) is responsible for the development of the system. PPS is constantly developing BLIK’s capabilities so that the system is as functional as possible for its users.

PPS’s shareholders are: Alior Bank, Bank Millennium, Santander Bank Polska, ING Bank Śląski, mBank, PKO Bank Polski and Mastercard. BLIK can also be used by customers of Getin Bank, Bank Pekao SA, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Inteligo, T-Mobile Banking Services and the cooperative banks associated in Spółdzielcza Grupa Bankowa, BPS Bank and cooperative banks from the BPS Group, as well as Nest Bank.