Poland’s BLIK Partners With Mastercard, Netflix And Uber For Payments

People who use Polish payment system BLIK will soon be able to pay for things like Netflix and Uber with it, according to a report by Reuters.

The chief executive of the Polish Payment Standard (PPS), Dariusz Mazurkiewicz, shared the news on Friday (June 28). PPS was created by a tie-up between six Polish banking institutions, and it’s embedded BLIK into banking apps so customers can transfer money, use ATMs and use it pay online or in stores.

“Enlarging the scope of our activity with this kind of player … means that we are building a very interesting acceptance network, not only for Polish bank customers, it might be any other bank customer,” Mazurkiewicz told the news outlet. “The next step will be to invite banks from other countries and this is why we want to concentrate our efforts right now on our region, central Europe.”

PPS also wants to sell software to other countries, but not under the BLIK name, and also wants to sell the whole system to companies that operate in Latin America and Africa.

PPS also partnered with Mastercard with plans to offer users a contactless payment option for the latter half of next year.

In a press release, the companies said that Mastercard and BLIK will provide consumers and merchants with contactless payments for BLIK users at all Mastercard-branded payment terminals across the globe. BLIK is taking advantage of Mastercard virtual debit cards tokenized by the Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES) to make it happen. That will enable BLIK customers to access what Polish Payment Standard said is the most convenient point of sale payment experience throughout the world.

The company is not, however, considering going public, according to Mazurkiewicz.

BLIK is popular in Poland, with around 91 million transactions in 2018, which is up from 2 million.

“It’s just tripled from one year to another and … we think that we will stick to this triple growth from one year to another in 2019,” Mazurkiewicz said.