"Global scale, local friction": Why global expansion breaks at checkout
Lessons from PayPal, BLIK, and Nuvei and the local payment methods that decide expansion
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For online businesses, it has never been easier to reach customers in almost any market the moment you launch. Shipping improved, translation improved, marketing improved. And then the checkout breaks, not because the customer changed their mind, but because the payment method they trust isn’t available.
In Episode 1 of Nuvei’s Everywhere Commerce podcast, “Global scale, local friction,” host Siobhan O’Neill‑Schwenk talks with three experts who live inside this problem every day: Adina Pop from Nuvei, Efi Dahan from PayPal and Monika Król from BLIK.
What this episode covers
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why the “success rate of transactions” is often the first thing to break when you launch into a new market and why even a one‑percentage‑point drop can mean billions in lost revenue for large merchants.
- How local payment preferences in markets like Belgium (Bancontact), Poland (BLIK), Portugal (MB WAY and Multibanco) and Brazil (Pix) can make or break your expansion strategy.
- Why many merchants still treat localization as a checklist (translate labels, add a few local methods, etc.) and how that approach destroys conversion and acceptance rates.
- How companies like Nuvei, PayPal and BLIK think about payments as an infrastructure problem: one global backend, many local frontends shaped by culture and habit.
- Where agentic commerce and AI‑driven buying journeys fit into the future of payments, and why trust becomes even more central when machines make purchase decisions on your behalf
Meet the guests
Adina Pop – Alternative payment methods at Nuvei
Adina’s day‑to‑day work is building payment infrastructures that let people everywhere pay for the services they need online, in the ways that feel safest and most familiar to them. From cash‑based Konbini payments in Japan to local schemes across Latin America, she connects local payment methods under a single Nuvei platform so merchants can serve each market’s preferences without stitching together dozens of integrations.
In the episode, Adina explains why “speaking payments” in a new country is as critical as speaking the language, and shares examples from Brazil and Colombia where a one‑percent change in acceptance rates or the absence of Pix‑like rails can mean a massive impact on revenue.
“Every single country has its very specific payment preferences. Speaking payments in a country is as important as speaking the language. Unless you give consumers the methods they trust, it’s going to be very difficult for you to conquer the market.”
– Adina Pop, Nuvei
Efi Dahan – Central and Eastern Europe and Israel, PayPal
Efi has spent more than 25 years helping people buy, sell, send and receive money globally and locally through PayPal. His focus is on making payments fast, simple and secure, while integrating local payment methods into PayPal’s global platform so consumers can keep the habits they trust and merchants can scale without handling every local method themselves.
On the show, Efi talks about trust as the most important asset in payments (today and over the next 20 years) and why global brands should collaborate with local methods rather than trying to change consumer behaviour in every market. He also shares his view on agentic commerce: it’s still early, but every company needs to experiment and keep trust at the centre as AI agents begin to transact on our behalf.
“If you want to offer your service globally, you have to collaborate. There is no chance that you can understand or compete in every specific market with limited resources. Trust is our main business, and integrating local payment methods in each market is part of building that trust.”
– Efi Dahan, PayPal
Monika Król – Vice President of the Board, BLIK
Monika is Vice President of the Management Board at BLIK, the Polish payment system that has grown from launch in 2015 to more than 2 billion payments a year and ~70% share of Polish ecommerce. Rather than trying to be a smaller copy of global players, BLIK focused on deep knowledge of local customers (their habits, how they shop and how they pay) and built a solution around those patterns.
In the episode, Monika explains how BLIK became a “love brand” in a category where nobody enjoys spending money, and why hiding local favourites behind global options at checkout is one of the biggest mistakes merchants make when entering Poland. She also shares why a global infrastructure with a local checkout experience is the most effective way forward for payments in Europe and beyond.
“Don’t try to be a smaller version of the global player. It’s much better if you focus on something that, on a local level, can be equally powerful – your knowledge of local customers, their habits, the way they shop and the way they pay. That’s the superpower in competing with the big giants.”
– Monika Król, BLIK
Key ideas from the conversation
1. Local methods aren’t an add‑on, they’re the core
All three guests stress that you cannot treat your home market setup as the template and bolt local options on at the end. Adina points out that in markets like Belgium, Poland and Portugal, missing the dominant local method (Bancontact, BLIK, MB WAY/Multibanco) makes it almost impossible to win meaningful market share.
Monika’s research shows that when a customer’s most‑preferred method is missing at checkout, they actively look for the same product elsewhere, where they can use the method they trust. Nuvei’s survey in the US found that six out of ten people have a preferred payment method and will go to another merchant to use it.
2. Customers trust how they pay more than who they buy from
One of the most striking data points in the episode is Adina’s observation that consumers often trust their payment method more than they trust the merchant. That inversion should reshape how brands think about expansion: the payment stack is not a back‑office concern, but a frontline trust mechanism.
When you remove a trusted method, you’re undermining the emotional safety net that makes people comfortable transacting online. This is why making local favourites visible and easy to use at checkout can dramatically improve conversion and success rates.
3. One global infrastructure, many local checkouts
Both Adina and Monika describe a future where payments are built on global rails but expressed through local experiences. Underneath, companies like Nuvei connect banks, schemes and wallets through a single backend so merchants can reach multiple markets via one integration. On the surface, however, the checkout needs to look and feel local, prioritising the methods people already use and trust.
Examples in the episode range from iDEAL in the Netherlands, built by a network of banks and a technology provider, to WeChat Pay in China, where payments are embedded in a broader social experience, and Pix in Brazil, which has become so central that not offering it leaves merchants “out of the payment game.”
4. Agentic commerce and AI protocols
Towards the end of the episode, the conversation turns to agentic commerce: AI agents making purchases on behalf of humans. Efi frames this as an evolution rather than an overnight shift, arguing that nobody will suddenly abandon existing behaviours in favour of fully AI‑driven experiences.
Adina, meanwhile, describes how Nuvei is developing an AI‑agnostic protocol that can support payment experiences executed by both humans and agents. The idea: the same infrastructure should allow a trusted agent to buy a pair of shoes on your behalf and route the payment through the methods and rails you already rely on.
Why this matters if you’re expanding globally
If you’re a brand planning to scale beyond your home market, this episode offers practical insight into why payment localization should sit alongside marketing, logistics and translation in your expansion roadmap. It shows how treating payments as infrastructure (not just a button at checkout) can unlock growth, protect margins and build trust with new customers faster.
From acceptance‑rate stories in Brazil to BLIK’s rise in Poland, the conversation makes a clear case: the companies that go global while thinking locally are the ones that keep the sale.
Closing thoughts
Global ecommerce has made it simple to reach customers everywhere, but this episode shows that payments remain stubbornly local. That’s where growth is won or lost. When you treat payments as shared infrastructure and local methods as front‑line trust signals, you stop losing the sale in the last two seconds at checkout and start meeting customers where they already are.
From Poland’s BLIK to Brazil’s Pix and beyond, the stories in this conversation underline a single point: the brands that go global while thinking locally are the ones that keep the sale and build durable relationships in every market they enter.
Stay ahead with Everywhere Commerce
Everywhere Commerce is produced by Nuvei, the infrastructure for every payment everywhere. Each episode explores how real‑world payment systems, local methods and emerging technologies like agentic commerce shape the way businesses grow across borders.
If you’re building or scaling outside your home market and want to turn payments from a point of friction into a source of advantage:
- Subscribe to Everywhere Commerce in your favourite podcast app.
- Follow Nuvei for new episodes, articles and practical guidance on global payments.
- Share this episode with your product, payments and expansion teams to start a deeper conversation about your payments strategy.
Until next time,
Team Nuvei
