The definitive source of global instant payments intelligence

Country focus: Poland

Poland launched their national instant payments network in June 2012 in response to market demand for a modern and convenient system. To date, 24 banks have joined this system.

This month we feature Poland, a member of the European Union, although like the UK not part of the Euro currency scheme.

Poland has been investing heavily in its payments infrastructure, and is in fact, recognised across Europe as a contactless and NFC payments market leader. There has been the introduction of a range of advanced banking services and above average transaction growth rates (+16%) have been reported. Card payments have been a significant success with 36 million cards now issued and a modern cards acceptance network established. Although card payments account for 48% of transaction volumes they only represent less than 1% of overall transactional values! Credit transfers account for the other 99% of total transaction value.

Their instant payments network

The national clearing house Krajowa Izba Rozliczeniowa (KIR) operates three main clearing systems. These are called: Elixir, Euro Elixir and Express Elixir (the last of these handles instant payments).

Our InstaPay tracker shows that there have been 1.3 million instant payment transactions processed since the start of 2016 – amounting to 5.2 billion Polish Zloty (ZL). In August 2016, 230 thousand transactions worth 884 million ZL were processed,  with volumes  increasing monthly. Express Elixir uses the ISO 20022 message formats and supports a variety of payment types and channels. A significant recent initiative has been the appointment of nine IT companies to help accelerate connection to the network and to help grow usage.

Michael Szymanski, Vice-President of the KIR Management Board explains that “This national realtime payments network operates 24×7 every day of the year even on non working days and during bank holidays and that instant transfers can be made by business and individual customers with a maximum single transaction value of 100 kPLN, although an unlimited number of transfers can be made daily.”

Feedback from customers

According to a survey conducted in 2016 for the Polish Bank Association (ZBP) and KIR, up to 2/3 of bank customers in Poland find instant transfers useful. Almost every fifth Pole holding a bank account used the service at least once. This survey also proves that bank customers find the instant transfer service useful primarily for payment of bills (according to 27% of respondents) and loans repayment (13%). Every fifth bank customer (21%) makes such a transfer, when they want to be sure that the recipient receives the money immediately. Instant transfers are also useful in business (16%), when liabilities to a contractor need to be settled urgently.

The Polish are heavy adopters of mobile phone technology with more than 50 million registered phones and 149 phones per 100 citizens. It is no surprise therefore that mobile payments of all formats are popular and seeing high usage. Express Elixir has provided the basis for a new national payments service called Blik launched in 2015. Blik is proving to be popular; it supports P2P transfers as well as merchant payments in-store and online. The instant payments network Express Elixir handles the transfer of funds in realtime mode. The phone number of the money recipient must be registered in the phone numbers database, so called ‘base of aliases’, managed by the Blik system operator. When someone orders a transfer to a phone number, the database matches the recipient’s phone number with their bank account number, in the standard IBAN format consisting of 26 digits. Then, a transfer order is processed and cleared via the Express Elixir system within seconds.

Latest statistics

The links below provide a range of the latest statistics for the Polish payments market.

Find out more information on Poland on our InstaPay tracker.