Poland’s Blik Expanding Mobile Payment Offering Across EU

Polish mobile payments company Blik has reportedly begun an international expansion.

The startup — whose popularity in its home country has matched that of Apple and Google’s payment apps — wants to become accessible across the European Union, CEO Dariusz Mazurkiewicz said in a Thursday (April 13) Bloomberg News interview.

“We aim to provide a solution that will ultimately be used by the French and Germans, just like it’s being used by the Poles now,” said Mazurkiewicz, who heads Polski Standard Płatności Sp zoo, Blik’s parent company.

“We have achieved success on a large, single market and realize that our model is easily scalable. We want to try expansion.”

Mazurkiewicz told Bloomberg the company is awaiting regulatory approval on a new business in Romania, while also purchasing Slovak online payments outfit Viamo to tap into the euro region.

Blik, a venture of six Polish banks and Mastercard, has 13 million users, telling Bloomberg that’s more than any of its European rivals. The company lets users make payments and money transfers without needing a bank card. Instead, its mobile app gives users a code tied to their phone number that lets them move money from account to account in seconds.

PYMNTS profiled Blik’s dominance in the Polish mobile payments market earlier this year, after the company reported that its users had made more than 1.2 billion transactions worth PLN 163.9 billion ($36.68 billion) in 2022, which amounted to respective increases of 110% and 162%, year over year.

As we noted at the time, integration of near field communication (NFC) functionality into its offering is a big win for the company, even if the contactless feature is only available on Android devices.

“What’s more, Apple’s exclusive hold over the iPhone’s NFC payment capacity may not last much longer following an EU antitrust probe into Apple Pay that may eventually force the U.S. tech giant to change course, opening the infrastructure to other mobile payment systems” such as Blik, PYMNTS wrote.

In an earlier interview with PYMNTS, Mazurkiewicz called NFC a “winning technology,” and said the company’s partnership with Mastercard arrangement empowers Blik users to use the digital wallet not just in Europe, but anywhere in the world where Mastercard is accepted.