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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
In this article, Martin Korbelář, Sales Director CEE at Tapix (Dateio), explores digital banking trends in Central and Eastern Europe, examining how Poland, Romania and Hungary are responding to fintech competition.
Retail banking is changing fast throughout parts of Central and Eastern Europe. While banking in Western Europe often moves at a measured pace, parts of the CEE region have become filled with digital experimentation, aggressive challenger expansion, and rapidly shifting consumer habits.
When examining Poland, Hungary, and Romania, we can observe three vastly different market realities. Poland stands as a mature digital fortress where domestic champions and collaborative infrastructure hold challengers at bay. Romania presents a fast-growing frontier with high card adoption but lower internet banking penetration, dominated by foreign banking groups and heavily disrupted by fintechs. Hungary sits firmly in the middle, anchored by an ambitious local champion, yet vulnerable to challenger competition due to the lack of a unified consumer payment rail.
Understanding these dynamics is critical for any financial institution fighting to remain relevant. At the centre of this battle is not just account acquisition, but retaining the coveted status of the “primary bank”, and winning back the lucrative transaction fees that are slipping away.
Poland represents the most digitally mature market in the region, boasting roughly 54.5 million retail client relationships across a population of 37.8 million. Mobile banking engagement is among the highest in Europe, with 28 million active mobile users representing a 51% activation rate across registered accounts.
Unlike markets dominated strictly by foreign players, Poland features a strong foundation of state- and locally owned entities, such as the market leader PKO Bank Polski (holding 14.9% of assets) and Pekao, alongside foreign subsidiaries. Rather than relying solely on individual app developments, Polish banks innovate collectively. The main example is BLIK, a joint-venture mobile payment rail owned by six major Polish banks. Reaching 21.1 million active users (56% of the population), BLIK processes over 756 million transactions quarterly across e-commerce, peer-to-peer, and recurring payments.
By offering simple, instant payments through BLIK, Polish banks cover the primary daily use cases fintechs typically target, keeping Revolut’s market penetration in Poland at a regional low of 13% (~5 million users). More than just a customer retention tool, BLIK provides domestic banks with a shared infrastructure that reduces reliance on Mastercard and Visa while significantly lowering transaction costs.
In contrast to Poland, Romania presents a unique dual growth story. On one hand, banking assets account for roughly 50% of GDP and credit penetration is low, with three in ten adults remaining entirely unbanked. And only about a third of the population regularly uses internet banking. On the other hand, modern card infrastructure is thriving, with over 24.6 million cards in circulation and high consumer familiarity with mobile payments and AI tools.
Except for domestic leader Banca Transilvania (holding 22% of market assets), the Romanian market is heavily dominated by foreign banking groups such as Erste (BCR), Raiffeisen, ING, and UniCredit, which has created a fertile ground for fintech adoption. Revolut has aggressively expanded in Romania, reaching 24% population penetration with 4.5 million clients, making it the largest bank in the country by number of cardholders.
To reduce reliance on cash and bypass costly international card networks, Romanian banks are rallying around RoPay. A national instant payment scheme launched by TRANSFOND and the Romanian Banking Association is now covering over 70% of the retail market and 6.77 million online customers. Meanwhile, the competition over customers with Revolut is being fought over digital user experience. Unlike Poland, where traditional apps closely match fintech standards, Romania faces a wider app UX and features gap, forcing local banks to rapidly innovate their online banking products or risk losing market share to Revolut.
Hungary sits midway along the maturity spectrum. It is a consolidated market, anchored by a domestic champion, OTP Bank (holding 24.3% of assets), alongside major foreign subsidiaries.
Hungarian banks are pushing hard on digital transformation. OTP Bank, according to its CEO Péter Csányi, for instance, automates 80% to 90% of consumer loan decisions via machine learning and explicitly targets a digital sales ratio in the top 25% in Europe.
Although Hungary launched a dedicated consumer payment brand, Qvik, on its instant payment infrastructure, the scheme has struggled to reach meaningful scale compared to mature rails like Poland’s BLIK. Notably, Qvik structurally excludes foreign challengers like Revolut and Wise by requiring a local Hungarian bank account, giving domestic banks a clear strategic advantage that they have yet to actively promote or capitalise on.
In parallel, digital challengers have established a large footprint. Revolut now reaches 23% of the population (2.3 million users), prompting the Hungarian Central Bank (MNB) to collectively classify foreign fintechs as the nation’s third-largest banking force by customer numbers.
Across all three markets, Revolut has evolved from a simple travel card into a formidable nemesis for traditional retail banks. The core issue facing incumbents is not necessarily account closure, but the erosion of “primary bank” status.
Consumers frequently maintain their salary deposits with traditional banks for perceived stability, but instantly transfer their discretionary income to Revolut for everyday spending, e-commerce, and subscription management. When customers pay through a secondary app, the primary bank loses crucial transaction interchange fees and valuable real-time consumer data.
For example, in Hungary, the share of urban banked adults treating a fintech card as their primary card jumped from 14% to 19% in a single year. With Revolut introducing local Hungarian IBANs in 2026, even the salary deposit barrier is now gone. The primary banking relationship is no longer won at account opening or by your family tradition; it is won on the smartphone home screen at the moment a customer decides which provider to use to pay their restaurant bill.
To pull transaction activity back into their own apps, banks across Poland, Romania, and Hungary are upgrading their mobile applications at speed with personal financial management (PFM) tools. Specifically, management of recurring subscriptions has emerged as a key strategic priority. Traditional banks finally recognised that subscription management addresses a real customer pain point while driving daily app engagement.
However, current bank implementations remain heavily fragmented:
The takeaway is clear: most banks have a subscription view, but nobody has the view.
A typical consumer might pay for video streaming on a debit card, a gym membership via direct debit, insurance through a standing order, and a telecom plan via BLIK. Because these payments flow across separate rails, the consumer is forced to navigate four different screens, leaving them without a single total monthly recurring expense figure.
There is a structural reason these views stay incomplete. Card schemes supply a merchant category code and an explicit recurring-payment indicator. You still need enrichment and cleansing, but at least it’s there. Account-to-account transfers carry neither, because the message format has no field for them. The card-based views are built on the rail these markets are working to shrink, and the transfer-based ones cannot see cards at all.
Subscription overviews fall short because modern payment rails operate on completely different data standards. Card networks output messy text strings that require enrichment, but A2A payment rails omit merchant category data altogether. Until banks implement intelligent transaction data enrichment capable of identifying recurring payments across every rail, their subscription overviews will remain incomplete tools that fail to win back primary status.
As platform consolidation accelerates, with major groups like Erste running George across Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and now Poland, the window to shape individual national product roadmaps is rapidly closing.
To protect market share and reclaim the primary bank customer relationship, banking executives must act on three key priorities:
