In every European country there's a payment method that's faster than the others and skips the card fees. In Italy it was supposed to be Satispay, in Spain Bizum, in Poland BLIK. Even though cards have now won in physical shops thanks to contactless, online it's still annoying to type in your card number, so these solutions hold up well.
In Europe these solutions work and make a lot of money. There's no public data on Bizum's revenue, but in Poland there's a product that does exactly what Satispay promises. It's called BLIK, and in 2024 it closed with nearly €100 million in revenue and €48 million in profit. It did it in a smaller, poorer market, with more basic technology and, in my opinion, one that's more convenient to use.
BLIK works with codes. If you want to pay in a shop, online or physical, you open your bank's app, generate a 6-digit code, type it into the terminal and confirm in the app. I've never shopped online so easily in Italy.
So how come Satispay has never managed to turn a profit, when BLIK pulled it off in a country half the size of Italy?
Both BLIK in Poland and Bizum in Spain were created by banks that coordinated to build their own payment standard, while in Italy Satispay is a third-party startup that builds the infrastructure on its own and doesn't have the connections the banks had to make Bizum or BLIK.
So Satispay had to invest from scratch to build its own network of merchants and users, and it did it in a very expensive way, handing out money to anyone who signed up. I did it myself. I got €25, then found out I couldn't link my bank account, the payment flow was clunky, and in the end I closed the account.
So how come the Italian banks never moved to do what the others did? What happened to leave a gap big enough to let a startup like Satispay exist?
The time the Italian banks tried to build Satispay
In Poland the banks built a standard that every bank had to adopt inside its own payment system. When you need to pay online or in a shop, you unlock your bank's app, the six-digit code is right there on the home screen, you type it in and confirm the payment. In Spain it works the same way with Bizum, to the point that "doing a bizum" has become a verb.
In Italy this didn't happen. Italy did have its own BLIK, it's called Bancomat Pay. It was built on top of the Bancomat circuit, with a huge potential base of thirty-seven million PagoBancomat cards, more than double the users BLIK put together in Poland.
So why does nobody use it? There are plenty of reasons, but the banks never coordinated. Only Intesa and UniCredit built the feature into their apps, and they did it without much conviction. In Poland the BLIK code was visible the moment you opened the app, it was actively pushed.
Except for Intesa and UniCredit customers, everyone else had to download a separate app and activate it by hand, exactly like Satispay, but without a strong brand behind it and without a real incentive.
Transfers between friends on Bancomat Pay carried fees, and the experience changed from bank to bank, because each institution could customise its own version. And for years the shops that accepted it were almost none.
Why the banks never got on the same page
There are two main reasons Bancomat Pay never got the weight it deserved behind it in Italy, while in Poland and Spain the banks coordinated well.
The Italian market is more fragmented than the banking systems in other countries. In Poland the market is dominated by a few big groups, and BLIK was pushed by the head of the largest bank, PKO, who made it a personal priority. In Italy the two giants, Intesa and UniCredit, are rivals, and around them sit hundreds of local banks that don't have the same incentive to invest in the technology, because the chance to acquire new customers is limited.
The second reason is that the big banks make money on card fees. A system that moves money straight from account to account, at low or no commission, eats into that margin. In Poland the banks accepted the sacrifice because they saw BLIK as a shared defence against Visa, Mastercard and the Apple and Google wallets. In Italy each bank preferred to protect its own card income, so they chose to earn now instead of looking ahead and protecting themselves from the oligopoly.
In the end Bancomat Pay still exists, but nobody uses it and it was a wasted opportunity. What I find strange is that the model is still perfectly valid, and it would take very little to copy BLIK's system and use it for online purchases.
The price of distribution
So how come Satispay racks up all these losses if the Italian banks left it a perfect opening?
BLIK and Bizum live inside the banks' apps, so they started with a ton of users without spending a euro on acquisition, and they reached merchants by riding the banks' existing infrastructure. They aren't real brands and they don't have Satispay's marketing machine behind them.
Satispay, on the other hand, had to pay to get a distribution network. They paid users with welcome bonuses that generated about 60% of their growth, and then they got merchants by signing them up one at a time.
Those ten years of losses bought a merchant network they own and a direct relationship with five million people. If Satispay can pivot today and sell employee benefits, it's thanks to that network they acquired.
And what a pivot it is. With more and more people paying by NFC in shops, Satispay started steering away from payments and introduced employee benefits, which already make up a third of its revenue, with margins seven times those of payments. It also introduced "Pay in 3", but that's a low-margin field full of credit risk: even Klarna, which went public in 2025, has lost around 60% on the stock market since then. This is unlikely to be the move that makes Satispay profitable.
What this means for you, if you're building
Satispay shows nicely that some opportunities sit where the technology already exists, dominates the market, and is badly made. In my humble opinion Italy is full of these cases, take TeamSystem. It's the incumbent of Italian accounting and tax software, it covered over 40% of the accountants' market on its own, and today it's a roll-up in the hands of private equity. Almost every product in its catalogue could be rebuilt better by anyone with good taste and the ability to market it.
Fatture in Cloud, to name one, is a TeamSystem product, and it's badly made. In fact there are already plenty of startups doing all of this better, like Fiscozen, which rebuilds the accountant for the self-employed and has raised €8 million from funds like Keen Venture Partners and United Ventures.
Jet HR rebuilds payroll and employee management, it raised €25 million in 2025 with Exor Ventures and Base10, and it quadrupled its customers in a year. Among its investors, surprise surprise, are the founders of Satispay. The same people who filled the banks' gap are now betting on whoever fills TeamSystem's gap.
When Satispay was growing, distribution already mattered a lot, but right now distribution is becoming more and more important. Rebuilding a mediocre product better has become trivial, so you have to know how to distribute it. The teams that know how to market build assets like communities, which stick around as a user base even after a pivot.
You can see this new importance of marketing in the way marketing is rebranding itself. The "GTM engineers" are arriving, engineers who do the job a marketer would do but reject the label, because "marketing" sounds vague and unserious to them. The very fact that a craft has to dress up as engineering to attract people who used to look down on it tells you how central it's become.
Is it still possible to grow like Satispay?
Satispay could buy distribution because it raised the money when money was free. The big round, €320 million at a unicorn valuation, closed in 2022, led by the funds that in that era financed long losses just to chase growth.
That window has closed. The next round, in 2024, was €64 million. From 320 to 64 in two years. Today nobody hands you half a billion to buy yourself a single-country network with no clear path to revenue or an IPO.
Satispay exists because two windows opened at the same time. A banking system that didn't coordinate, and a capital market that paid for losses. Both now closed. Which makes Satispay not a model to copy, but a product that couldn't be repeated, one tied to its time. If you want a single lesson, it's that for anyone building, the structure of the market matters more than your own talent.
