For a small business owner in Tirana or a worker sending money home from Sarajevo to a village in the mountains, the difference between a costly wire transfer that takes two days and a fast digital transfer can be the difference between making ends meet and falling short. Across Europe and Central Asia (ECA), the way people send, receive, and manage money is being transformed — and the stakes are high.
Technological evolution is disrupting conventional finance and giving millions of people the tools they need to conduct daily business, build financial resilience, and plan for the future. At the center of this shift are digital payments — typically the first point of contact between a person and the broader world of digital financial services.
The numbers tell part of the story. According to the latest World Bank Global Findex database, account ownership in ECA rose from 57 to 77 percent of adults over the last decade, while the share using digital payments climbed from 33 to 53 percent. Progress has been real and measurable — but it has not been even.
Old habits, new obstacles
Despite this momentum, significant challenges remain. In a number of countries, dominant financial incumbents have continued to promote payment instruments that fall short on inclusion and digitization. User experience lags behind what people expect, weighed down by access channels that are difficult to navigate, limited digital skills, connectivity gaps, and uneven access to smartphones. Meanwhile, the overlay services — such as request-to-pay and QR code functionalities — that make fast payment systems truly useful for everyday life are still underdeveloped in many markets.
These are not abstract policy problems. They play out every day in the choices people make about whether to trust a new payment method or stick with cash, whether a vendor bothers to set up a digital point-of-sale, or whether a government can efficiently deliver a social benefit to someone who has never held a bank account.
Learning from each other
To address these challenges head-on, the World Bank, under the umbrella of the Vienna Development Knowledge Center (VDKC), brought together payments experts from central banks across the Western Balkans, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, and Türkiye in March. The workshop is part of an ongoing series of VKDC activities that focus on topics with strong client demand, opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, and clear relevance to the European Union (EU) accession process and cross-border regional integration.
The value of that kind of exchange is something the World Bank knows well, having supported payment modernization efforts across multiple countries in Southeastern Europe and beyond.
"The modernization of payment systems is important from the perspective of lower costs, safety, and regional and international integration," said Holti Banka, Senior Financial Sector Specialist at the World Bank. "We have built a lot of knowledge supporting multiple central banks andgovernments in Southeastern Europe, so exchanges like this are priceless — they help countries avoid issues that others have already encountered."
The EU as a reform engine
One of the most powerful forces shaping payment systems in the region are the EU standards. Several countries have demonstrated that it is possible to keep pace with EU developments on the legal and regulatory front, transposing key directives — such as the revised Payment Services Directive, PSD2 — into national law. The result has been more competition, a broader range of financial products and services, and lower costs for both people and businesses.
That alignment has also opened the door to something unprecedented: integration into the Single Euro Payments Area, or SEPA. For the first time in SEPA's history, non-EU and non-EEA countries are being accepted into the Single Area — and the impact is already visible on the ground.
Real savings, real lives
For countries in the Western Balkans, inclusion in SEPA is already translating into tangible gains. A World Bank study published this year found that costs for businesses in the region fell by almost 96 percent since several Western Balkans countries operationalized SEPA last October. The same pattern is emerging in cross-border person-to-person payments — a particularly meaningful development for the millions of families who depend on remittances.
Underlying these gains is the growing adoption of Fast Payment Systems (FPS) — also known as instant or real-time payment systems — which have demonstrated the potential to transform the way people, businesses, and governments make and receive payments. As a foundational layer of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), these systems enable the instant transmission of payment messages and the immediate availability of funds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They support multiple payment instruments across different channels, and provide the infrastructure on which overlay services can be built — driving competition, interoperability, innovation, and efficiency across the market.
"Speeding up transactions in such a way was a major step in the evolution of European payments," said Dominic Winkler, Advisor in the Banking Law Department at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance, who presented at the March VDKC workshop. "It also ensures that the SEPA system remains competitive on a global scale."
A shared endeavor
The World Bank has been an active partner in this transformation, with several ongoing activities in the region. That work happens in close collaboration with development partners including the European Commission, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), and the Gates Foundation, among others — reflecting the conviction that modernizing payments is not a task any single institution can accomplish alone.
The March workshop in Vienna is one piece of a larger effort to ensure that the progress made is shared, that lessons travel across borders, and that no country has to navigate the pitfalls of payment reform without the benefit of its neighbors' experience.