Carrot and Stick: Impact of Regulations, Subsidies, and Obligations on the Development of Cashless Payments in Poland

Abstract Between 2012 and 2024, Poland—once a laggard in cashless payments among EU countries—underwent a profound transformation. The per capita number of cashless transactions at physical points of sale increased more than eightfold, rising from approximately 30 to over 250 per year, surpassing the EU average. While the number of payment cards per capita grew by about 40%, payment terminals per one million inhabitants increased almost fivefold, from 7,500 to 36,700. This paper adopts a two-stage analytical approach to examine whether policies introduced over the past decade influenced the growth in payment terminals and cards, and ultimately, the volume of cashless transactions. These policies include regulations of the interchange fee level, a program to subsidize payment terminals for merchants, and the introduction of the legal obligation for merchants to accept cashless instruments. Our findings indicate that the first two policies—interchange fee regulation and terminal subsidies—positively affected the expansion of the acceptance network. In turn, this expansion had a statistically significant impact on the growth of cashless payment usage.