What does the PKO BP–Allegro alliance mean for the future of finance?

Banking is no longer a separate island in the digital world. Once associated with heavy wooden branch doors and pages of paperwork, it is now moving boldly into the places where we all spend most of our time — digital ecosystems, shopping platforms, mobile apps and services we use almost automatically.

The new partnership between PKO BP and Allegro is not just a local curiosity — it is a visible sign of a global transformation that fintechs and BigTechs have been driving for years.

PKO BP has declared that its cooperation with Allegro aims to acquire at least one million new customers. In a world where banks compete not only with each other but also with fintechs like Revolut, Klarna, and PayPal — and BigTech giants developing their own financial services — traditional customer acquisition channels are losing effectiveness.

Modern banking is built on the power of ecosystems — and Allegro is one of the largest digital ecosystems in Poland.

Today’s consumers want to pay where they shop. They want financing where they sell. They want service where they already are — in e-commerce, in apps, in on-demand services.
The PKO BP–Allegro alliance responds to exactly this need, combining banking capabilities with a platform that processes millions of transactions every day.

“Both markets — banking and e-commerce — are very competitive. It’s increasingly difficult to build customer loyalty and you can’t do that without addressing real needs. And that’s what our partnership is about,”
said Rafał Czernik, Vice President of Allegro and CEO of Allegro Pay, during the conference in PKO Rotunda.

One-click payments: banking that disappears into the background

The Allegro Klik service is not just a new payment method. It’s a step toward embedded finance — a model in which the customer no longer thinks about the bank, because the bank becomes part of a larger journey.
Payments are built directly into the checkout process and happen without breaking the user’s flow.

This trend started with BNPL companies, and today, banks are adopting it. Customers don’t think about the underlying technology — they prioritise convenience, speed and a sense of security.

“Allegro Klik is the essence of embedded services — it responds to customer expectations and reflects strong cooperation between trusted, secure companies. After many months of joint work by PKO Bank Polski and Allegro teams, we are launching a project on an unprecedented scale,”
explained Marcin Kosiński, Director of Development at PKO Bank Polski and the project lead on the bank’s side.

Data-driven financing — once the domain of fintechs, now in the hands of banks

The biggest revolution in the PKO BP–Allegro partnership is Allegro Kapitał, a financing model based on real sales data.
This is the same model that turned several fintechs into global champions:

• Shopify Capital issues loans based on real-time merchant turnover.

• Amazon Lending finances sellers based on marketplace performance.

• Klarna uses purchase data to build risk profiles faster than traditional institutions.

PKO BP is doing the same — but with bank-level advantages: higher trust, greater scale and lower funding costs.

For micro-entrepreneurs, this opens doors that were previously shut. It enables them to expand offerings, increase inventory, invest in advertising — all without classic bureaucracy, loan-ready business plans, or waiting weeks for decisions.

Why are banks entering ecosystems? Because fintechs are already there.

Banks are not building ecosystems because it’s fashionable. They’re doing it because the stakes are real:

• Fintechs have already taken part in their market —
  Revolut attracted young customers, Klarna took over BNPL, and PayPal still dominates cross-border e-commerce.

• BigTech is entering finance —
  Apple has Apple Pay and Apple Card, Google experiments with banking services, and Amazon finances its sellers.

A bank that does not become part of the customer’s daily ecosystem will simply disappear from their field of view.
Today’s user chooses convenience over loyalty. For them, it doesn’t matter whether the “click to pay” comes from a bank, a fintech, or a marketplace — what matters is that it’s fast, cheap and secure.

Ecosystems as the future of banking

The PKO BP–Allegro partnership reflects a new philosophy: the ecosystem becomes the currency.
Whoever owns the ecosystem — owns the customer.

The bank becomes part of a broader service environment: where customers shop, sell, learn, travel or work.
This is not just a technological trend. It is a fundamental shift in business models, where the bank becomes a background service — and interestingly, the customer no longer goes to the bank.
The bank comes to the customer.

“The partnership between PKO BP and Allegro is one of the first large-scale examples proving that banking is no longer a stand-alone service — it is becoming part of a wider ecosystem logic. What was once the domain of fintechs is now being adopted by banks — but with greater scale, technological maturity and regulatory reliability. If we want to maintain the competitiveness of the Polish financial market, we need to build such bridges between banking, e-commerce and technology. They deliver faster, simpler, more intuitive services to customers — and stimulate innovation across the market. At FinTech Poland, we fully support this direction of development,”
— Piotr Brewiński, CEO of FinTech Poland.

The future of banking lies in ecosystem synergy

The PKO BP–Allegro collaboration is not an exception or an experiment.
It is a signal that banking is entering a new era — one in which banks compete not only with each other but with the entire world of fintech and technology platforms.

And the only viable response to this competition is integration, partnership and being present where the customer spends most of their time — in ecosystems.

This is the beginning of banking that is unobtrusive, convenient and nearly frictionless.