PPRO Partners with BLIK: The Local Payment Method Behind 71% of Polish E-Commerce Moves into Agentic Payments

PPRO and BLIK Pair Local Payments with Agentic Commerce

PPRO partners with BLIK on agentic payments

PPRO has partnered with Polish payment scheme BLIK to develop agentic commerce capabilities for local payments, connecting local payment methods with emerging AI-driven commerce.

ibsintelligence.com

PPRO, a company specializing in local payments infrastructure, officially announced a partnership with Polish mobile payment scheme BLIK on August 12, 2026. Together, the two companies will develop a framework enabling BLIK to support agent-initiated transactions in Poland, purchases started by AI agents rather than humans. PPRO will provide the infrastructure connecting local payment schemes, merchants, and payment service providers to emerging agentic commerce ecosystems.

PPRO describes the project as one of the first implementations of a local payment method for agent-initiated transactions anywhere in the world. The numbers behind the move are clear as well: according to research by Strategy& (PwC) cited by PPRO, AI agents could account for up to 15% of European e-commerce spending by 2030, with adoption growing up to four times faster than traditional e-commerce.

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BLIK's agility and market scale have allowed us to quickly build a framework for agent-initiated transactions in Poland.

Source: Motie Bring (CEO, PPRO)

On the BLIK side, Monika Król, Vice President of the Management Board, said the company is "pleased to explore how BLIK can be used within the evolving agentic commerce ecosystem." The tone is notably careful: this is participation in an exploratory phase, not a declaration of full commercial rollout.

What Is BLIK, and Why Does It Hold 71% of Polish E-Commerce?

BLIK may be unfamiliar to many readers, but it effectively dominates the Polish payments market. Operated by Polski Standard Płatności, a company founded by a consortium of banks, it lets users complete e-commerce payments, in-store purchases, ATM withdrawals, and peer-to-peer transfers directly from their bank accounts by entering a six-digit code valid for 120 seconds generated in their banking app. Structurally, it is an account-to-account (A2A) method that bypasses cards entirely; according to Stripe's guide, more than 95% of banked Poles have access to it.

Its track record is equally striking. Per data cited by PPRO, BLIK accounts for around 71% of Polish e-commerce transactions. In practice, no merchant selling online in Poland can afford to skip it. The partnership is designed to ensure Polish consumers can keep using the payment method they already know as AI agents become more involved in online purchases, and PPRO has stated it intends to use the framework as a blueprint for extending agentic payments to other local payment methods across Europe and Latin America.

Why A2A Joining Card-Centric Agentic Payments Matters

What makes this news significant is its potential to reshape the balance of power in agentic payments. Until now, the infrastructure buildout has been led by the Visa and Mastercard card networks. Visa's Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard's Agent Pay are both built on card tokenization, and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) from OpenAI and Stripe is likewise designed around shared card tokens. The prevailing vision of delegating purchases to agents has implicitly assumed a world where cards work.

Global e-commerce, however, is far from card-only. In many markets, account-to-account local methods dominate online payments: iDEAL in the Netherlands, Pix in Brazil, and UPI in India. BLIK in Poland is a textbook example. If only card-based agentic infrastructure gets built, consumers in these markets face the awkward choice of switching to cards just to let an AI agent shop for them. If local methods adapt instead, consumers change nothing.

The same concern is already driving action elsewhere. In India, NPCI, the operator of UPI, is developing a Unified Agent Protocol to authorize AI agent payments over UPI as national infrastructure, an effort to keep non-card payment regions from being left behind by agentic commerce. The BLIK initiative can be read as Europe's version of the same move, executed through a partnership between a private payments infrastructure company and a local scheme. Add the fact that AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol), backed by Google and partners, explicitly targets payment methods beyond cards, and the early equation of "agentic payments equals cards" is starting to break down.

PPRO's position as the partner is telling. Unlike Visa or Mastercard, PPRO does not own a scheme; it is an aggregator that bundles local payment methods worldwide into a single API for PSPs and merchants. Building agent support separately for every local method would be impractical, so an aggregator acting as a shared translation layer is a realistic counterweight to the card networks' tokenization stack.

The Open Problem: Delegating A2A Payments Built on Real-Time Human Approval

That said, this is not a story to tell with optimism alone. The announcement contains almost no technical detail. Which protocols it will interoperate with (ACP, AP2, or others), the commercial launch timeline, and the range of participating merchants and PSPs are all undisclosed. BLIK's own comments, as noted above, stay within the vocabulary of "exploring" and "testing."

There is also a structural difficulty. BLIK's authentication flow assumes human involvement by design: a person generates the code in their banking app and approves the transaction in real time via push notification. That instant-approval model cannot simply carry over to a scenario where an AI agent buys a product at 3 a.m. the moment it hits a target price. Analysts in the agentic payments space have flagged unresolved questions around mandate-based authorization replacing per-transaction consent, along with traceability of consent and allocation of liability. On top of that, A2A payments lack the standardized buyer protections of card chargebacks, so the question of who protects consumers when an agent misorders demands even more careful institutional design than it does for cards.

What This Means for E-Commerce Businesses

For e-commerce operators, including those in Japan, Poland's case is closer to home than it looks. First, for cross-border sellers into Poland or wider Europe, once agent-driven purchasing takes off, whether the payment method holding 71% local share works through agents will directly move conversion. It is now worth adding "local payment methods' agentic roadmap" to the checklist when selecting payment gateways and PSPs.

Second, the development mirrors where other markets may head. Japanese e-commerce also runs meaningfully on non-card methods such as convenience store payments, carrier billing, and QR code payments. If only the card networks' agent support advances, non-card customers are effectively excluded from agent-mediated purchasing. Whether precedents like BLIK, where the local method itself moves to support agents, continue to accumulate is a theme both domestic payment providers and merchants should watch.

Conclusion

The PPRO and BLIK partnership is not a one-off regional story but one of the earliest signals of a directional shift: agentic payments will not belong to cards alone. It remains an exploratory phase with no disclosed specifications or launch dates, and the hard problem of delegation models for A2A payments built on real-time human approval is still open. Even so, the fact that a local scheme handling 71% of a country's e-commerce transactions chose to move carries weight, and with expansion across Europe and Latin America already signposted, the follow-up will matter to every non-card payment region in the world. The payments map of the agent era looks set to be drawn by card networks and local payment methods together.