BLIK will automatically block payments to illegal online casinos in Poland from 1 September

Poland’s largest payment system is moving from site blocking to payment blocking. From 1 September, BLIK will automatically reject transfers to illegal online casinos, and that matters because BLIK handles the overwhelming majority of online payments in the country.

1. BLIK’s payment infrastructure will connect directly to the registry of prohibited gambling domains. If a transaction is routed to a site on that list, it will be rejected at the authorization stage, not after the fact.
2. Polski Standard Płatności, the operator of BLIK, received permission to launch the mechanism from the president of the National Bank of Poland. The checks will run automatically via the Ministry of Finance’s registry API.
3. The restriction will apply not only to direct payments, but also to transactions routed through foreign settlement agents. In other words, using an overseas intermediary will no longer be an easy way around the block.
4. Until now, Poland’s main tool against illegal gambling was blocking the sites themselves. Internet providers must restrict access to domains added to the registry within 48 hours. BLIK adds a payment barrier on top of that, which is a more direct hit to the operator’s monetization.
5. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the important part is the mechanism: a country with a dominant domestic payment rail is plugging the blacklist straight into authorization. That is about as close as you get to closing the obvious loopholes without asking every merchant to play cat-and-mouse with domains.

For high-risk payments, this is the bit worth watching: the regulator is targeting the payment layer, not just the website layer. If the model works in Poland, it is the kind of template other countries with a dominant national payment system may copy.