Not all payments confirm at the same speed, and the gap matters more than it looks. Some methods tell you instantly whether the payment went through. Others leave a window where the payment is pending and the outcome is unknown. Whether a method is synchronous or asynchronous decides how the checkout behaves, when an order can ship, and how finance reconciles what actually landed.
Here's the difference, why it matters operationally, and why a cross-border business has to support both.
A synchronous method returns a definitive result at the moment of payment. The buyer pays, and within seconds you know it succeeded or failed. Cards are the familiar example, along with real-time bank rails and most wallets, where an authorisation or instant transfer confirms on the spot.
The advantage is operational simplicity. Because the outcome is immediate, you can release digital goods, confirm an order, or grant access right away, with no pending state to manage. Pay, confirm, done. For businesses selling instant or digital products, synchronous methods are the natural fit because they match the expectation of immediate delivery.
An asynchronous method doesn't return a final result at checkout. Instead, the buyer gets instructions to complete payment through a separate channel, a bank transfer from their banking app, or a cash voucher paid at a store or agent, and confirmation arrives later, when the funds actually move. The gap can be seconds for an instant transfer that completes out of band, or a day or more for a voucher paid the next morning.
The defining feature is the pending state. Between checkout and confirmation, the order exists but the payment isn't yet certain, and you have to decide how to handle that window: hold the order until funds confirm, or release on trust and risk non-payment. For physical goods that's usually a simple hold. Asynchronous methods trade the simplicity of instant confirmation for reach, because they include the methods that dominate cash-heavy and bank-transfer-first markets.
The nature of a method ripples through three parts of the business.
At checkout, the flows differ. A synchronous method ends in a confirmation screen. An asynchronous one ends in instructions and a pending status, and the buyer needs a clear message that payment isn't complete yet. Get that messaging right and a buyer won't assume they've paid when they only hold a voucher.
At fulfilment, the pending window forces a policy. For asynchronous payments you generally hold the order until funds confirm, so the fulfilment system has to understand pending states rather than treating every checkout as a completed sale.
At reconciliation, asynchronous methods separate the order from the money in time. A payment started today may settle tomorrow, so finance has to match funds to orders across that gap, far easier when each payment is attributable from the moment it's initiated, and when a day's orders and a day's confirmations rarely line up on the same clock.
For asynchronous methods, the pending window is where conversions are won or lost, so it deserves deliberate design. The buyer needs an unambiguous message that payment isn't complete, clear instructions on how and where to pay, and a visible deadline before it expires. A buyer who leaves thinking they've paid won't go and pay, and that confusion, not the delay, is what loses the sale.
On your side, the pending state needs reliable signalling. Webhooks that fire the moment funds confirm let the order move from pending to paid without manual checking, and clean expiry handling releases held inventory when a transfer is never completed. Done this way, an asynchronous method behaves predictably.
A business selling only into card-dominant markets could live on synchronous methods alone. A cross-border business can't, because in much of the world the dominant local methods are asynchronous: bank transfers in many economies, cash vouchers across Latin America and parts of Asia. Refusing them means refusing how those markets pay, as covered in our guide to local payment methods in international payments.
A capable payment gateway handles both cleanly: instant confirmation where the method supports it, clear pending-state handling, webhooks, and reconciliation where it doesn't. The goal isn't to prefer one, it's to support each on its own terms, so you can accept the fast methods and the delayed ones without the delayed ones creating chaos.
Synchronous and asynchronous isn't a ranking. It's a description of how a method confirms. The businesses that sell widely built for both, because the world pays in both.
[1] Bank for International Settlements. "Fast payments." 2026.
Not everyone who wants to buy online can pay online the way card-centric markets assume. In much of Latin America and parts of Asia, a large share of buyers hold no international card and transact mostly in cash. Voucher-based payment methods bring those buyers into online commerce: they turn a cash payment made in the physical world into the settlement of an online order.
Here's how voucher payments work, where they matter, and how to accept them.
The flow is different from a card or a bank transfer, and understanding it is the key to supporting it well. At checkout, instead of entering payment details, the buyer picks the voucher method and gets a payment code, often a printable slip or a barcode. The order is created as pending. The buyer takes that code to a physical or digital payment point, a bank, a convenience store, an agent, or their banking app, and pays, usually in cash. When the payment point reports it, you get confirmation and can fulfil.
The consequence that shapes everything is timing. Unlike a card authorisation, a voucher doesn't confirm at checkout. The buyer might pay in minutes or wait until the next day, so there's a genuine gap between order and confirmation. Vouchers are, by nature, an asynchronous method, and handling that pending window well is what separates a smooth voucher integration from a confusing one, a distinction covered in our guide to synchronous versus asynchronous payment methods.
Voucher methods concentrate in markets with large cash economies and significant unbanked populations, and each market has its own scheme.
In Brazil, Boleto is a cornerstone of online payments, a bank slip payable at banks, ATMs, or apps. In Mexico, OXXO lets buyers pay cash for online purchases at the country's vast convenience-store network. Across parts of Asia, convenience-store and over-the-counter payments play a similar role. What unites them is that they aren't a fallback for people who could have used a card. For many buyers, the voucher is the only way to complete the purchase at all.
The reason vouchers matter is reach. In markets with large unbanked or underbanked populations, a substantial share of people can't pay with a card or an account-based transfer, because they hold neither. For those buyers, a voucher is the bridge between the cash they hold and the online purchase they want. Offering vouchers there isn't adding a convenience, it's opening the door to a segment a card-only checkout never reaches at all.
Two things make voucher acceptance work.
The first is clear communication in the pending window. The buyer needs to understand they haven't paid yet, that they hold a code, and how long they have before it expires. A confusing pending state is where voucher conversions are lost, because a buyer who thinks they've paid won't go and pay.
The second is the fulfilment policy. Because confirmation is delayed, you generally hold the order until the cash lands, so your order system has to understand pending payments rather than treating checkout as completion. For physical goods that's straightforward. For time-limited offers it needs a clear rule on how long to hold, since vouchers fit poorly with strict deadlines.
There's also an expiry to set. The code is valid for a window, after which it lapses and the order should be released. Set that window sensibly, long enough for a buyer to reach a payment point, short enough not to tie up inventory indefinitely. It also shapes where vouchers fit: they suit physical goods and standard digital orders where a short hold is fine, and fit poorly with strictly time-limited offers, where the delay works against the sale.
A cross-border payment gateway that supports vouchers handles the mechanics: generating the codes, connecting to the local networks, tracking the pending state, and firing a confirmation when the cash lands. That lets you reach the cash economy of a market without building voucher infrastructure country by country, and without turning your order system inside out to handle the delay.
Vouchers are easy to overlook from a card-first vantage point. But in the markets where they dominate, they aren't a minor method, they're how a large part of the population buys online, and in those markets that's a decisive share of the total. Supporting them is how a cross-border business reaches buyers a card-only checkout never sees.
[1] World Bank. "Global Findex Database." 2026.
Singapore is one of the most advanced payment markets in the world, and its banking is both concentrated and tightly connected. For a business selling into or operating in Singapore, being paid smoothly is less about which bank a customer uses and more about the shared rails that move money between all of them. Understand the banks and the rails together, and you can collect the way Singaporeans and Singapore businesses actually pay, which is exactly the local-methods pattern that runs across Southeast Asia.
Here's the banks, the rails, and what a cross-border business needs to be paid cleanly in Singapore.
Singapore's domestic banking is led by three local majors. DBS is the largest bank in Singapore and one of the largest in the region, with a dominant retail and corporate presence. OCBC and UOB are the other two pillars, both long-established, both with deep retail and business franchises across Singapore and the wider region. Between them, these three hold the bulk of domestic accounts, so most of any business's Singapore customers will bank with one of them.
Around the majors sits a strong field of international banks with a real local footprint, Standard Chartered (SCB) foremost among them for retail and business banking in Singapore, alongside others serving corporate and cross-border needs. A newer set of digital banks has added competition in retail and small-business banking too. A customer could bank anywhere across this field, which is exactly why the shared rails matter more than any single institution. You don't need a relationship with every bank. You need to be reachable on the rails they all share.
What makes Singapore easy to get paid in is the rails, not the banks. Three matter most.
PayNow lets customers send money instantly using a proxy, a mobile number for individuals or a Unique Entity Number for businesses, so the payer doesn't need the recipient's account number at all. It's become the default for fast payments, and a business that can be paid by PayNow strips friction out of collection.
FAST handles near-instant interbank transfers between participating banks, underpinning much of the instant movement beyond the proxy-based PayNow experience.
GIRO handles pre-authorised, scheduled collections and payments, the rail behind regular obligations. For a business collecting predictable amounts on a schedule, GIRO is the established mechanism.
Cards are widely used too, especially for retail and international purchases, so a complete setup pairs card acceptance with these local bank rails rather than choosing between them.
The practical upshot for a business is that being reachable on PayNow and FAST removes a real point of friction. A customer who can pay you instantly from their banking app, with nothing more than your business identifier, is a customer who completes the payment then and there. That immediacy is a big part of why these rails took over so quickly, and why a checkout that only offers cards feels a step behind in a market this instant-first.
Most businesses need Singapore to work both ways: collecting from customers and paying suppliers, staff, or partners. The same rails serve both. PayNow and FAST move funds in near real time for collections and payouts alike, and GIRO handles the scheduled, pre-authorised flows. A business that can both receive and pay out across these rails has a complete local money-movement footprint, rather than solving only the inbound half and leaving payouts to slow international transfers.
For a business based outside Singapore, the old obstacle was local presence. PayNow, FAST, and GIRO are domestic rails, and tapping them directly has meant a local entity and a local bank relationship, a high bar for serving the market from abroad.
A cross-border provider removes that bar. Through named local collection accounts, a business can receive Singapore payments over the local rails and hold the balance without standing up a Singapore entity, so its Singapore customers pay the way they always do. Paired with a payment gateway for cards, that's a complete local footprint: the instant bank rails Singapore runs on, plus cards, behind one integration.
Singapore is often the anchor market for wider regional expansion, and the model it teaches carries across Southeast Asia: local instant rails dominate, and the business that accepts them is paid the way the market expects. Get Singapore right, and you've got the template for everywhere you go next. Ask Singapore customers to adapt to a checkout built for somewhere else, and you leave money on the table.
[1] Monetary Authority of Singapore. "Payments in Singapore." 2026.
[2] Association of Banks in Singapore. "PayNow and FAST." 2026.
If you're setting up payments for Australia and reaching for POLi, stop, it's gone. POLi shut down on 30 September 2023, and a lot of guides still haven't caught up. The real question isn't what replaced it (nothing did, directly). It's what Australian buyers and businesses actually use now, and the answer splits cleanly between accepting money and paying it out.
Here's the current state of play.
POLi let shoppers pay by bank transfer without a card. It worked by screen scraping, logging into the customer's online banking on their behalf to move the money. That model was always uneasy with the banks, who tightened their stance against credential sharing, and POLi closed on 30 September 2023.
There is no like-for-like successor. So the practical answer for consumer checkout is not "find the new POLi." It's to lean on what Australian shoppers already use.
For consumer checkout, cards and digital wallets carry Australian retail, online and in person. Australians are heavy card and mobile-wallet users, and that's what a checkout aimed at Australian buyers needs first.
One thing to watch: card surcharging is under RBA review. The rules around whether and how merchants can pass card costs to customers are being reconsidered, so the economics of card acceptance in Australia may shift. It's worth tracking if cards are a big share of your Australian volume, but it doesn't change the basic answer that cards and wallets are how Australian consumers pay.
Business payments are a different picture, and this is where the modern rails matter.
The New Payments Platform (NPP) is Australia's real-time account-to-account rail. It settles fast and carries richer data with each payment, which makes reconciliation cleaner than the older batch system. For disbursements, payroll, supplier payments, refunds, it's mature and ready.
PayID sits on top of the NPP as an addressing layer. Instead of a BSB and account number, a payment can be addressed to a phone number, email, or an ABN. The ABN option is the interesting one for business: addressing a supplier payment to their ABN reduces the misdirection risk that comes with manually keyed account numbers. PayID has more than 11 million registrations, though most NPP traffic still runs on BSB and account number, so it's a growing option rather than the default yet.
BECS is the incumbent batch rail, and it still carries the bulk of payroll, supplier, and bill-payment volume. It's older and slower than the NPP, but it's entrenched, which matters for the next part.
For a while, the plan was to sunset BECS and migrate everything to the NPP by June 2030. That gave businesses a clear reason to move.
In December 2025, AusPayNet withdrew the 2030 decommissioning target entirely. BECS no longer has an end date. So the two rails now coexist indefinitely: the NPP for fast, data-rich payments, BECS for the entrenched batch volume it still carries. For a business paying into Australia, that means you can't assume BECS is going away, and you plan for both rather than betting on a migration that no longer has a deadline.
There's also PayTo, the mandate-based rail meant to succeed direct debit. It's promising, but the RBA's own assessment is that it has yet to demonstrate maturity, and it currently handles single transfers only. Worth watching, not yet worth building your Australian direct-debit strategy around.
If you're accepting from Australian consumers: lead with cards and digital wallets, and keep an eye on the RBA surcharging review since it may change the cost math.
If you're paying into Australia: use the NPP for fast, well-reconciled disbursements, consider PayID's ABN addressing to cut supplier-payment errors, and keep BECS in the plan because it isn't going anywhere. Don't build around a 2030 migration that's been called off.
A cross-border business shouldn't have to stand up an Australian entity to do any of this. Through Tazapay, you can accept Australian payments the way local buyers pay and pay into Australia over the local rails, without a local presence, so your Australian flows work both directions from wherever you're based.
POLi's closure left a gap, but not a crisis. Australia's payment story in 2026 is simple once you split it: cards and wallets to get paid, the NPP and BECS to pay out, PayID to address it more safely, and PayTo as one to watch.
[1] Reserve Bank of Australia. "Payments System Review." 2026.
[2] AusPayNet. "Australian Payments Network." 2026.
[3] Australian Payments Plus. "NPP and PayID." 2026.
The Philippines sits on both sides of most international businesses' operations, and the infrastructure you need differs completely depending on which direction your money moves.
Selling into the Philippines means consumer checkout, and the market is unusually concentrated: two wallets reach almost everyone, one QR standard covers merchant acceptance, and cash remains stubbornly present.
Paying into the Philippines means disbursement to agencies, outsourcing providers, contractors, sellers and individuals. The Philippines is one of the world's largest services exporters, and over USD 30 billion flows in annually from overseas Filipino workers, which has made the receive-side rails some of the most developed in the region [1].
Most guides cover the first and ignore the second. This one covers both.
Both directions run through the same two wallets, which is why they come first.
The Philippines is the only ASEAN country where consumer e-wallets collectively hold higher monthly active usage than retail bank apps [1]. GCash has over 94 million registered users, and GCash plus Maya together reach roughly 95% of digitally active Filipinos [1][2].
GCash is the dominant wallet and, for a large share of the population, the primary financial account rather than a supplement to one. It handles payments, transfers, bill payments, and the disbursement of welfare payments, subsidies and inbound remittances [2]. For a consumer with no bank account, GCash is not a payment app. It is the account.
Maya (formerly PayMaya) skews toward banked consumers, with integrated savings, credit and payment features [2]. It serves a genuinely different user base rather than being a smaller copy of GCash, which is why the two together reach far more of the market than either alone.
ShopeePay and GrabPay fill the third tier, each strongest inside its own ecosystem [3].
GCash is the first integration and it is not optional. A checkout without it is inaccessible to the modal Philippine consumer in the way they normally pay [1][2]. Maya is the second, for the different segment it reaches.
QR Ph is the BSP-mandated interoperable merchant QR standard, working across GCash, Maya and participating banks from a single displayed code [2][3]. This is the same architectural choice as QRIS in Indonesia or SGQR in Singapore: the central bank preventing closed-loop QR fragmentation before it took hold. For in-person and QR-based acceptance, supporting QR Ph is more efficient than integrating wallet by wallet.
Cards remain necessary for higher-value purchases, corporate buyers and international customers, but they are not where consumer volume sits.
Cash is the part most international merchants underestimate. Digital wallets captured 41% of e-commerce value and 29% of point-of-sale value in 2025, while cash still accounted for 42% of in-store value [4]. The Global Payments Report 2026 identifies the Philippines as having the highest cash usage of any market it tracks in the region [4].
Those facts are not contradictory. They describe a market that has gone digital fast at the top and remains substantially cash-based underneath. The operational consequence is that cash-on-delivery and over-the-counter collection is not a legacy feature to sunset. A meaningful share of Philippine e-commerce orders still settle through one of those channels, and a checkout offering only wallets and cards will lose those orders rather than convert them.
This is where Dragonpay sits. It is a Philippine payment service provider built around bank transfers and a large network of physical collection points including 7-Eleven, serving customers who are unbanked or prefer cash, with fixed-fee structures that suit some transaction profiles better than percentage pricing [5].
What changed since Dragonpay was the default answer for international merchants is not Dragonpay itself. It is that the wallet tier grew enormously around it and the BSP built interoperable rails that did not previously exist. Over-the-counter collection is now one layer of a Philippine acceptance strategy rather than the foundation of one.
Here the governing fact is a number, and it catches more international teams than anything else in this market.
The BSP operates two interbank rails and they are not interchangeable.
InstaPay settles immediately and operates continuously, sitting underneath most send-to-bank and send-to-wallet flows. It is capped at PHP 50,000 per transaction [1].
PESONet clears in same-business-day batches rather than immediately, and it carries higher-value business payments precisely because it is not subject to that ceiling [1].
Most platforms operating here use InstaPay for retail-scale flows and PESONet for business-scale ones, and the choice is dictated by the limit rather than by preference [1].
Where this bites: a monthly contractor payment, an agency invoice, a supplier settlement or a marketplace seller payout with meaningful order values will routinely exceed PHP 50,000. A disbursement stack built on InstaPay alone will either fail those payments or split them, which creates reconciliation problems on the recipient side.
Wallet-destination payouts matter for anyone paying individuals. For a substantial share of the contractor and gig workforce, the wallet is the account and there is no bank account behind it. A payout stack that can only reach bank accounts will fail on a meaningful proportion of a Philippine contractor base, and the failure looks like onboarding drop-off rather than a technical error, because the payee cannot supply details they do not have.
Every payment service provider operating in the Philippines requires BSP authorisation [3]. For an international business this determines who can legally hold and move your funds in-market, and it is worth establishing before scoping an integration.
The practical question to resolve early is coverage. A provider with InstaPay access but no PESONet access has a hard ceiling on what it can disburse. A provider with bank rails but no wallet disbursement cannot pay a large share of the individual contractor base. A provider with wallet acceptance but no over-the-counter network will miss cash-preferring buyers.
If you sell into the Philippines: GCash first, Maya second, QR Ph for interoperable acceptance, cards for higher-value and international buyers, and an over-the-counter option because cash is 42% of in-store value and a real share of e-commerce settlement [1][4][5].
If you pay into the Philippines: confirm PESONet access, not just InstaPay, because the PHP 50,000 ceiling determines whether your payouts work at scale. Support wallet-destination payouts if you pay individuals [1].
If you do both: your provider needs to reach both rails, both wallets, and an over-the-counter network. That combination is less common than it sounds.
For businesses paying Philippine suppliers, sellers and contractors at scale, the rail split is the operational core of the integration. For businesses collecting from Philippine buyers, a named collection account gives each incoming payment an attribution rather than landing it in a pooled balance. For the wider regional picture, see our guide to payment methods across Southeast Asia.
[1] Kaadxpay. "Philippines Payments Guide: GCash, Maya, InstaPay & PESONet (2026)." April 2026. https://www.kaadxpay.com/en/countries/philippines
[2] HitPay. "Best Payment Gateway for GCash Philippines 2026." June 2026. https://hitpayapp.com/blog/best-payment-gateway-gcash-philippines
[3] HitPay. "Best Payment Gateway API in the Philippines 2026." July 2026. https://hitpayapp.com/blog/best-payment-gateway-api-philippines
[4] Fintech Singapore / Worldpay Global Payments Report 2026. "Southeast Asia Payment Methods in 2026." April 2026. https://fintechnews.sg/128337/e-commerce/southeast-asia-payment-methods-2026-global-payments-report/
[5] SiteGiant. "Popular Payment Gateway in Philippines 2026." March 2026. https://sitegiant.ph/blog/popular-payment-gateway-in-philippines-2026/
Sofort was a bank transfer payment method available across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Klarna acquired Sofort in 2014 and, in late 2023, announced its consolidation into Klarna Pay Now. The standalone Sofort payment method was fully discontinued on September 30, 2024 [1].
Merchants that relied on Sofort needed to migrate to Klarna Pay Now (which provides similar bank transfer functionality under the Klarna brand) or switch to alternative bank transfer methods such as SEPA Instant, Open Banking-based payment initiation, or country-specific methods like iDEAL or EPS.
This is not an isolated event. Giropay, Germany's other major bank transfer method, was also deprecated in mid-2024. The European payment landscape is consolidating around SEPA Instant as the universal A2A rail, with country-specific methods serving particular markets.
SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) is the most important development in European payments since the original SEPA standardization. It settles transfers in under 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at fees no higher than standard SEPA transfers [2].
Since January 2025, Eurozone banks are required to offer SEPA Instant for receiving payments. The sending obligation follows later. Non-eurozone EU member states must comply by January 2027 (receiving) and July 2027 (sending plus Verification of Payee) [2].
Verification of Payee (VoP) is now mandatory alongside SEPA Instant in the Eurozone. Before a payment is executed, the sending bank verifies that the payee name matches the IBAN. This reduces fraud and misdirected payments but adds a verification step that merchants and platforms need to account for in their checkout flows.
SEPA Instant will progressively replace standard SEPA Credit Transfers for most use cases. For businesses collecting payments from European customers, SEPA Instant provides immediate payment confirmation with irrevocable settlement, significantly better than the 1-2 day settlement window of standard SEPA.
While SEPA Instant provides a universal rail, several country-specific payment methods retain dominant positions in their home markets. These methods predate SEPA Instant and continue to be preferred by local consumers due to familiarity, integration with domestic banking apps, and established merchant acceptance.
iDEAL (Netherlands): The dominant online payment method in the Netherlands, historically accounting for around 70% of Dutch e-commerce transactions. iDEAL redirects the customer to their bank's online banking portal to authorize a direct transfer. For any business selling to Dutch consumers, iDEAL is non-negotiable. iDEAL is transitioning to iDEAL 2.0, which builds on SEPA Instant and Open Banking infrastructure.
Bancontact (Belgium): Belgium's domestic debit card and online payment scheme, used by the majority of Belgian consumers for both in-store and online purchases. Bancontact supports card-present (contactless NFC) and card-not-present (online redirect) transactions. Its integration with Payconiq enables QR-based mobile payments.
EPS (Austria): Austria's online bank transfer method, which redirects customers to their Austrian bank for payment authorization. Similar to iDEAL in function, EPS is the preferred online payment method for Austrian consumers alongside cards.
Klarna Pay Now: The successor to Sofort. Klarna Pay Now provides immediate bank transfer functionality under the Klarna brand. It is available across Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and other European markets where Sofort previously operated. Klarna also offers Pay Later (invoice) and installment options, though those are separate products.
Przelewy24 (Poland): Poland's dominant online payment aggregator, connecting to all major Polish banks. Essential for any business selling into the Polish market.
For international businesses already selling into Europe via card networks, the EU's Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) creates a structurally different cost environment than the US or APAC.
Consumer card interchange in the EU is capped at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit [3]. Compare this to the US, where interchange ranges from 1.0-2.5% depending on card type and is uncapped. A transaction that costs a merchant 2.5% in interchange in the US costs 0.2-0.3% in the EU.
Cross-border card-not-present interchange within the EEA is capped at 1.15% for debit and 1.50% for credit [3]. Post-Brexit UK ↔ EEA interchange is higher and under regulatory review. For a detailed breakdown of all five cost layers in payment gateway pricing, including how EU caps compare to uncapped markets, see our gateway costs blog.
The practical implication: card acceptance in Europe is significantly cheaper than in the US, which changes the calculus on whether APMs save money. In Europe, the case for APMs is less about cost saving and more about conversion optimization. iDEAL in the Netherlands and Bancontact in Belgium convert at higher rates than international cards because they are the methods consumers expect and trust.
Three priorities for European payment acceptance.
First, ensure SEPA Instant readiness. As VoP becomes mandatory across the Eurozone, your payment infrastructure needs to support the verification step. SEPA Instant provides immediate, irrevocable settlement, which eliminates the cash flow uncertainty of standard SEPA transfers.
Second, integrate country-specific APMs for your top European markets. iDEAL for the Netherlands, Bancontact for Belgium, EPS for Austria, Przelewy24 for Poland. These methods can lift checkout conversion by 10-20% over cards alone because they are the payment methods local consumers prefer [4].
Third, take advantage of EU interchange caps. If you are selling into Europe from outside the EU, your card processing costs are structurally lower than in the US or APAC. A payment gateway with local European acquiring can further reduce costs by processing transactions as intra-EEA rather than cross-border.
For the equivalent breakdown of how e-wallets and QR payments work across Southeast Asia, where the payment landscape is structurally different from Europe, see our SEA payments guide.
[1] Solidgate. "Klarna Deprecated Sofort: What Merchants Need to Do." May 2026. https://solidgate.com/blog/klarna-deprecated-sofort-as-a-payment-method/
[2] Klarna. "How Instant Payments Will Spark Competition in Europe." 2023. https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-comment-how-instant-payments-will-spark-competition-in-europe/
[3] Adyen. "Interchange Fees Explained." April 2026. https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/interchange-fees-explained
[4] GR4VY. "Payment Methods by Country 2026: What Dominates Each Market." April 2026. https://gr4vy.com/posts/payment-methods-by-country-2026-what-dominates-each-market-and-how-to-accept-them/
