qvik: Cheaper Than Cards, but What Will It Take to Catch On?

Most people know qvik as a way to pay bills, yet the system brings together four payment methods and could become a real competitor for card payments. At our September Business Breakfast, we talked with Zsolt Viktor Járó, Head of Corporate Cash Management at CIB Bank, about what merchants stand to gain from qvik, what’s slowing its adoption, and what new customer experiences could be built on it. Ádám Drágus, design strategist at Ergomania, moderated the conversation.

 

In Járó’s experience, many executives and finance directors believe they know qvik, only to find out they know just one part of it. qvik is in fact an ecosystem comprising four payment methods.

Hungary’s central bank, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, launched qvik in September 2024 to create a domestic competitor to the international card companies and to reduce the fees merchants pay on card purchases. All four payment methods are account-to-account (A2A) solutions: the money moves directly between bank accounts rather than through a card. In essence, it is a transfer initiated on request – the merchant requests, the customer pays – and it’s free for private individuals.

The four methods fall into two groups. The qvik request, formerly called a payment request, runs exclusively on GIRO, Hungary’s interbank clearing system, directly from bank to bank, with no intermediary. QR code, deeplink, and NFC (contactless) payments, on the other hand, involve a third party, currently Innopay, much as Visa or Mastercard sit in the middle of a card payment. The card companies have thus been cut out of the process, but someone else has taken their place and also charges a fee. These methods are cheaper than cards, but not by as much as many expected. Because it has no intermediary, the first method, the qvik request, is not only the cheapest of the four but also the most secure and the most resilient: there is one fewer party whose failure could block the payment, and it would take a very serious fault to bring GIRO down.

Control Stays with the Payer

QR codes and deeplinks are essentially the same and differ only in how they are presented. If the request arrives on a phone, it would be awkward to scan the code with that same phone, so a link is the practical option. Both take the payer to their banking app, where, after fingerprint or face authentication, a pre-filled transfer order is waiting. The payer can approve it, reject it, or let it expire – a request stays valid for up to 60 days.

According to Járó, this is one of qvik’s key advantages over cards. With card payments, the cashier often types in the amount by hand rather than having it passed on from the till. If they get it wrong, the system deducts the wrong amount from the account. Most shoppers don’t check the digits; they just tap their card, and often only notice at home how much was taken. With qvik, the amount is right there on the phone screen before approval.

The same applies to NFC: here too, a tap alone doesn’t trigger the payment, as the payer always has to approve it on their phone. In Járó’s view, this isn’t a slower process; it’s a more controlled and more secure one. In his experience, approving a qvik request takes no longer than paying with Apple Pay or Google Pay.

When the Wrong Banking App Opens

Someone in the audience raised a practical problem: If you have three banking apps on your phone, a deeplink automatically opens one of them, and not necessarily the one you want to pay with. Járó explained that Android offers a choice, whereas on an iPhone the first choice becomes the default. Phone makers are not going to rewrite their systems for the sake of a Hungarian standard, so the option to choose has to be built on the bank’s side.

Here, too, the qvik request has the edge. It can be sent to two types of identifiers: the GIRO account number or a secondary identifier, such as a phone number, email address, or tax ID. If the request goes to an account number, the system knows exactly which bank’s app to open. That’s why CIB advises service providers to use the bank account number rather than a secondary identifier.

A Modern Payment Slip Instead of Direct Debit

qvik can replace more than cards. Along the way, large service providers and lawmakers realized it could also replace the direct debits used by telecom companies, insurers, and utility companies. Direct debit is still slow in 2026: for the money to arrive on a given day, the provider has to initiate the collection six days in advance. The practice dates back to the days when companies handed the items to be collected over to banks as CSV or XML files, on pen drives or by email.

Another problem is that many providers initiate collection on the second or third day of the month, when most people have not yet been paid. If there are insufficient funds, the collection fails, and the system does not retry. According to Járó, on average 70% of direct debits go through, while for qvik transactions the figure is 92–93%. Insurance companies then charge late fees and send reminder letters, which cost four to ten times as much as a payment request.

The qvik request, by contrast, works as a modern version of the postal payment slip Hungarians have long used to pay their bills. The provider sends the request and sets a deadline. Customers pay once their salary arrives; the system sends reminders five, three, and one day before the deadline.

How Much Can Merchants Save?

According to Járó, with qvik requests, merchants can cut their fees to a third or a quarter on average, while QR, deeplink, and NFC payments are 30–40% cheaper than card payments. A single transaction is capped at HUF 20 million, but larger amounts can be split across several requests. CIB Bank charges a fixed fee for qvik requests, regardless of the amount, whether it is HUF 100,000 or HUF 18 million.

This matters especially for large amounts. Car dealers are reluctant to accept cards for a car costing HUF 23–25 million, because even a 1% transaction fee adds up to a significant sum. Their service departments do accept cards, even though a service bill can also run to several hundred thousand forints. In property purchases, it has become popular to settle a HUF 60 million price with three HUF 20 million qvik requests, at a fraction of what a high-value bank transfer would cost.

CIB has built a calculator that shows how much a merchant could save with qvik. For an unnamed grocery chain, the calculation showed that if it moved all its card payments to qvik, it could save HUF 180 million in card costs. A complete switch is not realistic, as progress can only be gradual, but the figure shows the order of magnitude. qvik is recommended for everyone from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations: large companies have many small transactions, while smaller companies have fewer transactions but may also handle larger amounts. Businesses with low transaction volumes generally pay higher fees; for them, qvik can bring costs down from a 3.5% card fee to around 1%.

Trust and Education

Asked what might slow qvik’s adoption, Járó named distrust first. People give out their card details without a second thought, even on dubious websites, yet they are afraid to share their bank account number – even though an account number can at most be used to send you money, while card details are far easier to misuse. Where customers do try qvik, however, they quickly come to like it.

According to Járó, banks, merchants, and the regulator all have a role to play in education; the audience added consumer protection to the list. One participant suggested that the banking system has not put enough effort into raising awareness of real-time payments, and that merchants are not given enough incentive either. Another pointed out that card payments have 30 years of education behind them: people know cards are safe, can be blocked, and are accepted almost everywhere.

One audience member cited Poland’s BLIK as an example of how change can get underway: the system was introduced with the backing of the central bank, and students taught market vendors and shoppers how to use it.

Loyalty and New Customer Experiences

Merchants often ask the question: Even if qvik is cheaper for them, how do they get customers to use it when using their cards is just as free and convenient for them? According to Járó, the most common answer is loyalty: small discounts, gifts, and points. One petrol station chain currently sells fuel 5 forints cheaper to customers who have its app installed. For qvik payments, it could offer a 10-forint discount.

Drágus recalled the experience of MOL, the Hungarian oil and gas group, shared at an earlier Business Breakfast. According to the company’s data, what keeps customers in its loyalty program is not primarily the savings but the sense of being part of a system. Járó sees this as the opening for a genuinely new customer experience. If the loyalty program and payment merge into a single step – the customer shows their ID, collects their points, picks up their usual hot dog, and pays with one tap – that’s more than just a cheaper way to pay.

Next Up: The Physical Checkout

Most people today associate qvik with online payments, but CIB also wants to bring it into physical retail spaces like petrol stations, fast-food restaurants, and tobacconists, where payment needs to be quick. This also requires that there be no need to read out or type in numbers at the till. Járó’s goal is that paying with qvik feels as natural as tapping a card: tap, and you’re out the door.

He expects a major boost from the cash register upgrade and from the new reporting obligations to the Hungarian Tax Authority (NAV) affecting small businesses. If every business has to have a cash register or software-based till, qvik payments – mostly via QR code – will be available at every checkout, including at businesses that have so far found card acceptance too expensive. E-receipts could also speed up adoption: purchases will be linked to payments through a unique identifier and will be trackable in the Digital Citizenship Programme (DÁP) app, the Hungarian government’s digital ID and e-services platform. Járó also counts stability in qvik’s favor: at large festivals, card systems sometimes go down under heavy load, whereas payments running on GIRO are far less likely to fail.

Ultimately a UX Question

The system’s biggest limitation today is that it only works with Hungarian forint current accounts, which leaves out foreigners. A French school and an American school welcomed the solution enthusiastically, until it turned out that only 8% of parents had a forint current account. According to Járó, qvik could gain a real advantage if it were linked to the EU’s instant payment systems. That’s why he sees Wero, the European payment solution that more and more countries are joining, as an opportunity rather than a threat. There is interest from abroad as well: an Asian provider with several million customers recently approached CIB about making qvik available to its own customers.

At the end of the conversation, Drágus suggested that if education had come up this often in connection with qvik’s adoption, then it is really a question of UX too. Járó added that it is just as much about trust: everyone should be walked through a qvik payment at least once. Someone in the audience observed that the best education is a product that works well. Járó agreed. No matter how closely the banking system, merchants, the regulator, and consumer protection work together on it, if paying is a struggle, nobody will use it, no matter how big a discount they are offered.