71% of Polish E-Commerce, Absent From Both Standards Bodies

PPRO said on 12 August that it is working with BLIK to build agent-initiated payments in Poland, in what it describes as one of the world's first local payment method implementations for agentic commerce.

The number that makes it worth reading is in the second paragraph of the release. BLIK accounts for around 71% of e-commerce transactions in Poland. If agentic commerce settles into a card-first pattern, that is the size of what gets routed around in one market.

The problem PPRO names is a routing problem

The release states the concern directly rather than leaving it implied. Without support for local payment methods, PPRO says, the agentic economy risks defaulting to a card-centric payment model, limiting access to the payment methods consumers rely on and prefer across many regions.

It also explains why cards start ahead. Global card schemes have native features such as tokenisation that streamline the adoption of agentic commerce. A software agent needs a credential it can hold and present without a human in the loop, and the card networks already built that machinery for other reasons.

Local schemes generally did not. BLIK is built around a six-digit code generated inside a banking app and confirmed by the user, a design whose security model assumes a person is present at the moment of payment. Adapting that to a transaction initiated by an agent is not a marketing exercise.

PPRO's stated role is to supply the infrastructure that lets local schemes, merchants and payment service providers participate. For PPRO the project is explicitly a template: it says the work will provide a blueprint for expanding agentic payments to additional local payment methods in Europe and Latin America.

The two partners describe the same project differently

Reading both quotes in the release together is more informative than reading either alone.

Motie Bring, PPRO's chief executive, says the initiative demonstrates how local payment methods "can – and will – power the future of AI commerce". Monika Król, vice president of the management board at BLIK, says the company is "pleased to explore how BLIK can be used within the evolving agentic commerce ecosystem and to take part in testing solutions that may shape the future of online payments".

One party is describing an outcome. The other is describing an experiment. Nothing in the release is announced as live, no launch date is given, no merchant is named, and no transaction volume is claimed.

That gap is not a contradiction and it is common in partnership announcements between an infrastructure vendor and a scheme. But it is the difference between "this is happening" and "we are testing whether this can happen", and a reader deciding whether to plan around agentic local payments in Poland should know which one the release actually supports.

The forecasts are the vendor's own

Two forward-looking figures anchor the release, and both are attributed to nobody.

PPRO states that AI agents are projected to drive up to 15% of European e-commerce spending by 2030, and that adoption is expected to accelerate up to four times faster than traditional e-commerce. The release gives no source, no methodology and no definition of what counts as agent-driven spending.

They may well be reasonable estimates. They are also the kind of number that gets repeated into apparent fact, and they arrive in a document published by a company whose commercial interest is served if they turn out to be true. The 71% share figure sits in the same release and carries no citation either, though it is a present-tense market statistic rather than a projection.

Mastercard is a shareholder in the local scheme

The neatest complication in the story is in the boilerplate at the bottom of the release.

BLIK is operated by Polish Payment Standard, and the release lists that company's shareholders: Alior Bank, Millennium Bank, Erste Bank Polska, ING Bank Śląski, mBank, PKO Bank Polski, and Mastercard.

So the local scheme positioned as the alternative to a card-centric agentic model counts one of the two global card networks among its owners. That does not undercut the initiative — schemes and networks have held stakes in each other for years — but it does mean the framing of local methods versus card rails is cleaner in a press release than in a shareholder register.

The standards conversation is happening elsewhere

Two industry bodies for agentic payments now exist. Neither includes BLIK or Polish Payment Standard, and PPRO is in neither.

The Agentic Payments Alliance, launched on 18 August, names 26 founding members. Checking that list against the categories of company involved, none of the 26 is a domestic local payment scheme of the BLIK, Pix or iDEAL type. The x402 Foundation, which listed 49 members when HaiPay checked on 19 August, is not quite as narrow: it includes Kakaopay and Hecto Financial, both Korean, so at least some non-card domestic players are inside. But no European domestic scheme appears in either.

The comparison is a membership check, not a judgement about influence. Schemes participate in standards work through many channels that do not involve joining a named body, and both lists change. What it does establish is that the venues currently writing and testing agentic payment standards are populated by card networks, processors, crypto infrastructure and orchestration vendors, while the method carrying roughly seven in ten Polish online transactions is represented in neither.

What is established and what is not

Established: PPRO announced on 12 August that it is working with BLIK on agent-initiated transactions in Poland, describing it as one of the world's first such implementations for a local payment method. BLIK accounts for around 71% of Polish e-commerce transactions on PPRO's figure. PPRO intends the project as a blueprint for other local methods in Europe and Latin America. Polish Payment Standard's shareholders include six Polish banks and Mastercard.

Not established: when anything goes live, which merchants or PSPs are involved, how agent authorisation will work within BLIK's code-and-confirm model, whether BLIK has committed beyond testing, where the 15% and four-times projections come from, and how the 71% figure is measured — by transaction count, by value, or across which merchant population.

The defensible reading is that the first serious attempt to bring a dominant European local payment method into agentic commerce has been announced as an exploration, by a vendor with a clear commercial stake, in a market where the alternative to solving it is that seven in ten online transactions get designed around.