Wero is basically an EU-wide version of the Dutch iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work. I shouldn't have to fill in any card numbers on the site of the merchant (which is unsafe). Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system. I've always been annoyed by the need to type in sensitive card info on all sorts of merchant sites. I hope that with EU-wide use, Wero will receive much broader support now.
PIX from Brazil is even better, to be honest. But this is a big improvement over online CC payment.
I lived in the NL and Brazil, so I can compare the two, and while iDEAL is pretty good, PIX is easier to understand, explain, and deal with.
PIX has more variants, you can use it for recurrent payment, split payments, financing, cashout and almost all things a CC can do nowadays.
I would say Tikkie is almost as good and easy to use as PIX usecase wise but has less adoption and variants, also it belongs to ABN which is completely different from PIX approach.
PIX is also better because it gives control back to the central bank (as it was with cash) and not private industry although they are providing the service. The central bank controls what payments are permitted by what laws exist, not some risk management system that has decided that your legal purchase is too risky or some foreign state has applied sanctions against you.
And that's the whole reason why Wero has been made I think. It's because the ECB wants to advance on their digital euro plans due to sovereignty concerns, and I think this push is to dismiss that argument.
That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.
> That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.
If you ever had your account blocked by Apple or Google, you know exactly why a government is the better option. At least you have the rule of law on your side.
Big companies are the authoritarian situation, not the government.
If you've ever read any history you'd know why a government is definitely not the better option.
It deems to me that the rule of law is easier to apply to third parties than to the government that is in charge of administering it
I trust my government (Switzerland) way more to do the thing that is right for the people and the law then some private company that has the primary goal of making money. It doesn't mean that governments don't make mistakes but the primary goal is to serve its people.
That is what government is for in a functioning democracy. A functioning government is of the people for the people.
The American mind cannot comprehend
I hope I get to live in such a place some day.
> I trust my government (Switzerland)
I do, too. I’m not sure I trust Brussels.
I certainly trust the EU a lot more than I trust US corporations.
Considering the head of EZB is a convicted criminal with, lets call it interesting, letters to the convicted criminal Sarkozy I am not sure what is plague and what cholera.
Taken into account than of two convicted criminals, Sarkozy went to prison and will probably be sent there again, whereas Trump is running a big country, I'm pretty sure which is which.
I guess it comes down to who you would trust more - your own government which you have some control over via elections or some (potentially multinational) corporation which you have exactly zero control over?
It's the other way around. You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad. You have very, very coarse-grained control with the government every few years.
> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad.
There are exactly two companies in the global credit card market and they operate in lockstep, literally coming to agreements to shut down legal businesses together. Visa and MasterCard have absolutely no right to determine who is and isn't allowed to receive payment. Governments have that right, but that doesn't mean they should use it -- if they're abusing that right, people can vote them out. The effectiveness of people voting out harmful politicians is another matter, but that's kind of on the people being bad at voting, not the idea of government altogether, and at any rate you have no vote whatsoever in what MC/Visa do (unless you vote for government to regulate them!).
> You have choice with a company,
This is wrong for a large share of the companies that most people deal with on a daily basis. And that share has been steadily increasing every single year.
Ok, I choose to not use Visa/Mastercard in the US, and I want to subscribe to some saas. What do I do now? Or do you mean "choice" as in "you can always choose not the breathe or eat"?
To be pedantic American Express and Discover exist.
But I agree with your meaning. We are beholden to some third party no matter how we move in the current situation.
Amex is regularly rejected by businesses and cannot be your only credit card, so really you maybe have Discover.
I also wouldn’t say either of those is particularly better than Visa/Mastercard. They all engage in the same practices more or less
The only places I've found that refuse AMEX are very small mom and pop operations. And of those, many don't accept cards of any type: cash only.
> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly
Oh yeah?
Please enlihhten me, how exactly can I switch providers from the Visa/Mastercard duopoly?
Like others said that choice is not really given in this case.
Also with the government option it wouldn’t mean that you can’t still use other methods - for example in brasil credit card or cash work just fine, PIX is just one (very convenient) option.
In the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take.
Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
Agree to disagree. Lock-in is a thing that companies design for.
You only have a potential choice until a company buys out all its competitors and surpresses the rest.
I've moved countries five times in my life. I still haven't been able to fully get rid of my dependency on Big Tech or the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
Brazil is on the West, fyi.
The new alignment isnt East vs West... But North vs Global South, which Brazil sees itself a part of the South.
Where's Russia and Australia then?
???
Wrong thread?
The comment I see reads like this:
"That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine."
on the West of what? Culturally and historically it's a Western country, yes, but politically and economically it's an Eastern country – founding member of BRICS and a developing economy. I think the author of the parent comment used "Western" term referring to ideological and economic grouping
I think the idea of what’s authoritarian sounding is more of a cultural/historical/ideological distinction, not something that would naturally map to an economic label like BRICS.
Also Western and Eastern are just labels in this context, not opposite directions, even if Brazil was “not Western” in some way, it wouldn’t make sense to call it Eastern.
West is just the US nowadays.
I would say West is Europe, Japan and a few others. But I think I need a new word for that one.
Ehh, I live in Europe. Moving forward I don't think it makes sense to bundle it with the US, who is like the biggest threat to the EU, considering the past few years.
Wero is run by the banks themselves, which are in turn controlled/restricted by the central bank. I don't think there's a meaningful difference on that front.
The European ECB isn't really in a position to directly offer services to people, and relying on every country's central banks to cooperate will take decades.
The central bank is governed by a direct mandate from the government (and, effectively, the entire population, when dealing with a democracy). Commercial and investment banks are beholden to their board and shareholders. There's a clear conflict of interest in trying to dump a service that should be available to everyone onto a business with narrower concerns.
The difference is clearly that banks have a different agenda from central banks.
SWIFT is a cooperative of banks also but it seems that some central banks endeavours are better. BTW Argentina created an innovation back in the early 2000s as a product of a crisis. It was implemented in record time and transfers were immediate back then and improving. It's not run by the central banks though.
PIX should be the gold standard for this - it’s works perfectly for all use cases that I can think of.
Hell even the homeless people around here take donations in PIX, but you can also buy a house with it.
Zero fees involved
> Zero fees involved
Won’t someone think of the profits!
> PIX from Brazil is even better, to be honest.
You lack the inherent fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor protection that Visa/Mastercard provides.
Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.
That is by design. It separates the payment processor so it does just that, just payments. It is like money, once you give it to someone else there is no automatic way to fish it back from their pocket to yours. The correct avenue to deal with fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor is the small claims court (or civil court, or criminal court).
The moment you start burdening the payment processor with the roles of judge/referee over all goods and services you end up with the mess we have with CCs where Visa/Mastercard are morality czars that dictate what goods and services are valid or invalid, nuking people and companies out of modern society for their own arbitrary reasons.
Edit: And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.
> their own arbitrary reasons
Outside pressure behind much of it.
In any case, there's a fundamental mismatch between pressure groups and the leverage they can exert through single-consensus. I don't know how to describe the other consensus that is on my brain, but it is distinct.
That makes it a bad design, since every person you interact with has the potential to be a scumbag and not deliver on what you paid for. "Get a lawyer and sue them" or "Rely on your local consumer advocacy agency" cannot be the answers at the kind of scale that will be enabled.
This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards, and never use cash or debit cards (European in the US). I've personally had at least three disputes this year resolved in my favor by American Express, and will not sign up for something that suggests courts should do so instead.
At least up til now, this doesn't seem to be a significant problem with iDeal. Any iDeal receiver will need to have at least a Dutch bank account, which requires the bank to be very sure of the identity of the person/people (UBOs) holding the account. So downright fraud is unlikely. If there is, one can file a police report, and hopefully the DA will take it to court.
Disputes between non-fraudulent entities happen of course. But I really don't like some algorithm somewhere taking seemingly arbitrary decisions on that. It usually just amounts to robbing merchants of their money, and adding some exorbitant refund fee to top it of. Settling disputes is what small claims court and dispute committees are for.
Of course, with iDeal now effectively becoming EU-wide, things may get more difficult.
(I was editing when you repplied so I'll add it here for you:)
And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.
There also a large number of typos that happen. Typos in the amount. Typos in email or mobile number where you are sending the funds to (if pushing a payment instead of seller pulling).
Yes, but it's a statistically negative sum game for the customer. Visa wouldn't offer such a service if they weren't winning out in the long run, collecting rent on every one of your purchases.
That’s like telling people not to get homeowners insurance for the same reason
Like, yes, it’s technically a bad deal. But it’s still worth the extra cost for most people
> But it’s still worth the extra cost for most people.
Is it? You charge back over 2% of your transaction volume? If you don't then just removing the middleman will make everyone happier. If you do, I have questions as to why...
I am sure they gain something from it.
My Brazillian bank charges me 600% yearly interest on credit card purchases.
However, the cost of a lawsuit can quickly offset the costs of a CC. Depending on the state, there may not be a maximum cap on expenses, making lawsuits incredibly expensive. (Whereas having paid by card you could ask for a chargeback instead of needing to sue)
It's also a very time consuming ordeal having to sue vendors in these instances.
You're describing the concept of insurance.
It's not the visa/mastercard that offer chargeback, but the bank.
Thats a good argument but those are also features that could be provided by the force of government power in a government and country where the government is not and has not intentionally been corrupted, partially for the very purpose of preventing something like digital cash that is anonymous just like cash was before people foolishly gave in to the “convenience” of cards and acting like they had money by using credit cards.
This looks as a benefit on the surface, but it is not. In the end everybody loses -- the bank, the network, the customer, the merchant.
That has nothing to do with visa/MasterCard. (Well maybe it does in Brasil). In Poland if you use BLIK which is also a national payment network and you get scammed or money stolen from you the bank will also refund you, same as with visa or MasterCard.
Since last year, Colombia has implemented Bre-B, our copy of Brazil’s Pix, and it’s been fantastic. I can’t wait to see it mature to the same level as Pix, and I really hope both systems are eventually linked together.
> you can use it for recurrent payment, split payments, financing, cashout and almost all things a CC can do nowadays
But can credit cards really do all those things? You just entrust your credit card number to a party that does it for you, but the credit card system itself isn't taking care of those things like recurring payments.
Wero does have recurring payments planned too (apparently for end of 2026), seems like they're well aware of PIX and racing hard to get into exactly the same space.
Nah, BLIK from Poland was there earlier and is in many ways better, Wero was unfairly lobbied for by the old European guard, so most of Eastern Europe walked away.
They are now hesitantly joining Wero, supporting it only to downplay and to lobby ECB for an API platform and not for a product.
Tikkie has a different usecase. It's meant for smaller payments between individuals
In fact, you can pay a Tikkie using iDEAL/Wero
PIX is for everything, but Indeed Tikkie is more a p2p tool.
I think Colombian's Bre-B system took heavy inspiration on PIX. It is amazing and so easy to use.
(I haven't tried PIX so not sure) but UPI is really great too and I think that Pix is similar to UPI and UPI was launched by India nearly 4 years ago than brazil.
Anyways, one of the things that I am interested about in payment systems is say creating cross-payments between Pix,UPI and Wero.
UPI is already there for a few countries and there are more trials which are happening and my brother was a bit involved in trying to add UPI to london. (I think it was some efforts by his college perhaps, I am not sure completely.)
For India, the largest points are remittances and for other nations, it gives a really well built payment system and integrates it to more economies.
UPI is accepted in seven countries: Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
What about authentication?
I remember living in Belgium this was the case, and I always had to go and find that stupid physical barcode reader that I then had to hold against the screen, sign in with my debit card, PIN, enter the Euro amount, and then sign the transaction.
Now that I live in the USA, I have my credit card number in Bitwarden, with expiration date and CVC.
When I want to buy something, I let it autofill, and I don't have to verify and / or sign any transactions, bar high price ones (e.g. new $5k TV from Best Buy).
And in terms of security? It's a credit card. I review my statement every month. If I didn't make the purchase I call the fraud department and the charge is removed. Last time I did that they didn't even ask me questions.
I'd take Apple pay over the old(?) EU system.
One thing that surprises me a lot is that in order to use Wero with my ING account, I have to give access to my contacts, which I ultimately am not going to do. I wonder how the European payment system can be so ignorant of their customers' privacy.
> iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work
Is it? I see it more as an underwhelming fix for SEPA Direct Debit's inability to verify payment data synchronously.
* iDeal doesn't support basic features like pre-authorization. I'm not even sure if it supports setting up a payment agreement without triggering an immediate payment at all (pretty sure it didn't, when we integrated it a couple of years ago).
* It hands over the customer's IBAN, which isn't really that much safer than a credit card number, since any merchant can trigger a SEPA Direct Debit using it. While you can trigger a chargeback, that requires you to actively monitor for fraudulent transactions, which a decent system wouldn't allow in the first place.
* iDeal recurring payments are SEPA Direct Debit, with all their downsides, like taking days to confirm and a payment that fails due to insufficient funds in the customer's bank account resulting in a significant fee the merchant has to pay (and will probably pass on to the customer).
And Wero has one of the worst, least informative websites I have ever seen. So it's really hard to figure out how it works, and what it supports.
> It hands over the customer's IBAN, which isn't really that much safer than a credit card number, since any merchant can trigger a SEPA Direct Debit using it.
Yes. And they would quickly lose their ability to process any payments. This is the exact same idea as how credit cards work. I don't see my IBAN as a secret, all my friends have it, as thats how they can send me money right to my account.
> that requires you to actively monitor for fraudulent transactions, which a decent system wouldn't allow in the first place.
So that rules out credit cards too, exact same system.
I'm not familiar with pix mentioned in the other threads, but I am not familiar with any other system that is better
Interestingly in a number of African Countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania etc) , we have “Mobile Money”, Payments are instant, via USSD, no internet required, I can even pay online using USSD push.This is a classical example of humans using what they have to build what they need , no fancy internet enabled smart phones required. I can send money anytime instantly to my grandma deep in the village. She can withdraw from or top up her account in the numerous mobile money stalls that are everywhere. You pay school dues, medical bills , groceries via mobile money. I don’t remember the last time I visited a bank, hell I can even get an instant loan by just dailing *165# on my no internet feature phone.
That's still a man in the middle coordinating the payments (mpesa, etc...) and essentially holding both sides of the transaction. When you send money to somebody with mobile money you're sending it to the mobile network operator who then let's the other person know so they can move the money to somebody else (or cashout or leave it there).
It's not really a federated system because you can't for instance send money from mpesa in kenya to a different provider in uganda.
Actually you can send money (cross border payments ) to another country that also has mobile money, I can send money to a Kenyan, Tanzanian etc all I need is their Phone number.
I am not sure what you mean by “holding both sides of the transaction “, when you send me money it appears in my balance (which I can check via a USSD query), it’s essentially a bank account but on USSD and sms. A lot of cross border payments are now settled via USSD. Hell I can now get a Visa/Mastercard by just dailing a code and I will have payment details with my name and address.
the mobile money while convenient r not exactly secure due to MITM.
Are you referring to m-pesa?
I'm just not sure this directly competes with MC/Visa the way the article suggests.
Didn't other EU countries already have something similar to iDEAL, as opposed to using credit cards? And now we're just consolidating them?
Also, isn't this just about online payments? Who's going to pay for a coffee with either Wero or a credit card? AFAIK most EU consumers use direct debit cards for in-store payments (those countries where cash is no longer popular), be it via Apple Pay / Google Pay or not. Many a card of which by the way is directly or indirectly powered by Visa or Mastercard.
At any rate, I don't see EuroPA or Wero break the 'hegemony' of Visa/MC the way this article claims.
There is a 3DSecure system for existing Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. After typing your card numbers, the transaction doesn’t immediately go through but you are also redirected to the bank’s system. Banks can ask you to use a hardware token, an app, or any other second factor to approve the transaction.
It’s a shame that this system isn’t ubiquitous for the rest of us not in EU.
> After typing your card numbers
Yes, but the whole point of Wero is that you don't have to type in a bunch of info that can be easily stolen. With Wero (and many other international solutions), you just scan a code with your phone, and your banking app handles the transactions. The existing legacy solutions are just duct tape on an existing system.
If 3DS and chip + PIN card usage were ubiquitous, the value of a stolen card number and even card would be zero, and this entire problem would go away.
Unfortunately, legacy deployments have just proven too pervasive to effect real change, even with substantial incentives, especially in early card adopting markets such as the US.
Aren't they ubiquitous and required at least for 5-10 years now?
The US essentially uses neither 3DS nor PINs.
But what's the value of stolen card data? It always requires 2FA to be used. It's just routing information to your bank.
Are there still cards that work without 2FA?
Does it mean that instead of depending on the Visa/Mastercard duopoly you now depend on the Google/Apple duopoly?
Of course not, since you can just install the Android app on your free software aftermarket OS. Surely banks wouldn't require hardware attestation or monitor your device for being rooted, would they? /s
Irony aside, yeah, this is a significant downside compared to hardware-based standards. Not so much for Android, as Google Pay and most competitors are implemented in software, but on a hypothetical iPhone or Garmin device running an open OS (don't laugh, it's a thought experiment), payment data security would be not much of a concern since all payment keys live in a secure and completely separate chip.
If this system is ubiquitous stealing your card number would be useless. Your card number becomes a user name like jonkoops that you would have no qualms sharing.
So you have to use a phone or does it work without one?
Does it handle credit card payments?
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> you just scan a code with your phone,
And authorize yourself with the banking app, and, and...
It's not less complicated than auto filling credit/debit card details with your finger print on your phone or laptop.
For consumers, Wero, Pix, and similar systems only have down sides for online use. The most important down side is that you can't reclaim your funds if you've been the victim of fraud. Which you can when paying by card.
The problem with 3D Secure is that the merchant can unilaterally decide not to use it, which defeats the whole purpose of 3D Secure.
> the merchant can unilaterally decide not to use it
If they do so, they are telling the card issuer that they are happy to be on the hook for chargebacks/fraud. It's not an decision without consequences
Comparing to fraud 3DS reduces sales turn over by a lot, and this is the reason why for the most part it is not required in the US, too much friction during check out hurts business.
I tend to associate ignoring 3D Secure with Stripe. In the name of "less friction" of course.
non-3DS payments are trivial to chargeback, at least in the EU
They are everywhere. Default liability for online payments is and has always been with the merchant; only 3DS and some wallets can shift it to the issuer.
In America all payments are trivial to chargeback anyways.
We ought to have liability shifting. A long time ago there was a liability shift where if a merchant uses the magnetic stripe on a card equipped with a chip, then the merchant is unconditionally liable in case of a chargeback. We just needed merchants to be liable when the bank supported 3DSecure but the merchant chose not to use it.
The problem is that these are all US systems.
This is pretty much every payment I do in Finland works. Always have to go and verify it using my online banking credentials after I've entered the numbers. Does make me wonder why I need to bother with the whole number, expiry and CVV bullshit anyway.
I think any dutchie can vouch that iDeal has been amazing. I would also like to add that Wise has been amazing for american payments. I needed it for Anthropic at the time, and this worked good enough
Certainly better and easier to say than Chipknip!
Funnily enough, the ECB's Digital Euro initiative has a lot in common with the chipknip, except you can now also charge your wallet with larger amounts of money.
RIP chipknip. But let’s appreciate its ambition: electronic payments without being online.
Wero is super confusing. They're in the business of acquiring different methods (I don't even know if they always buy them outright or if they merge or they are just associated in some way), branding them ALL wero, and announcing that every payment in every channel will be rolled out SOON via wero, without ever offering specifics.
So in The Netherlands wero is the new name of eCommerce payments, but in another country the new name for peer2peer. But no idea when p2p will launch in the Netherlands or when eCommerce will launch elsewhere. And if the existing services will be degraded when they are internationalized or merged.
Banks and Visa/Mastercard probably love that you fill out your CC details on an online store, and next time you can just 1-click pay. Probably causes a big jump in revenue/profit. That's why they never innovated much.
Of course, it is incorrect, and digital payments everywhere (on a kiosk or online) should be intentional pushes, not pulls.
I want many payments to be pull-based (at least I'd go crazy having to positively sign off every utility bill and subscription), but the ideal user interface for pull payments shows who exactly is pulling what, with a few days notice, and a one-click way to cancel any standing authorization.
You could still have this 1-click experience with another system.
Like you could set some rule like “this vendor is approved for charges below $50”. We don’t need the legacy system for that.
(I don’t know if any payment systems can do that atm, just that if we wanted we could make them do that)
Visa seemed not to care too much about fraud though so at some level they do prefer ease of use over security
The redirect to a bank is worrying, isn’t it trivial to fake redirecting to a fake bank ?
You'll need to fake much more than just that. Usually the bank website will ask you to confirm the transaction by opening the banking app on your mobile phone.
Trading a dependency on MasterCard and Visa for one on Google and Apple is at best a sidegrade. More likely you end up worse off.
Not really, since in modern 3DS implementations, the redirect pretty much only shows a modal saying "check your phone for a notification and confirm this payment there".
Worst case, you'll be entering a one-time code received out of band, e.g. via SMS, and that message will mention what you are consenting to by entering it anywhere, so even MITM attacks are very hard.
The days of entering a static password in 3DS are long gone.
not really, the redirect itself is happening at EMV DS level, not by the merchant himself. Merchant has no idea what bank your card belongs to, so he does not know which bank to redirect you to.
there's the polish BLIK which is basically the same idea and there are probably a dozen more in other countries; need consolidation in this space tbh
> Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system.
That's basically Paypal and everyone still shits on them.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about the actual PayPal payments flow. Most complaints are around seizing large balances due to suspected fraud...
paypal goes to great lengths to not be regulated as a bank, right?
That’s how giro payments work. Same for Klarna.
Most online merchants redirect me to my bank's web page when I enter my Visa credit card number. In theory it should be possible to have a card number that by itself is useless and always requires an external confirmation?
with a mastercard from a swedish bank that is the experience that i get. all online transactions pop up a page from my back with qr code, this is authenticated through an app that shows me the transaction details and requires pin confirmation.
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In Denmark i currently have to enter my card details but then, i get a popup where i have to enter my government issued ID username and scan a QR code from the related app (or enter from a 2fa token generator)
Its annoying - but it feels quite secure
I recommend also have a look at how eCommerce is done in Chile, e.g. Transbank (WebPay), FinToc and others. Chile passed some very good FinTech legislation a few years ago.
This is one of the reasons I opt for PayPal in the US when I have the choice. I've been in too many breaches. Direct to bank would be better, but I trust PayPal's security more than a random ecommerce website's security.
I caution PayPal would only work if you trusted the original shopping site, and perhaps your "credentials" got breached and used illicitly elsewhere. I got banned from PayPal after I tried to buy an electrical switch, was on an (apparently scam) website, never received the item, and opened a PayPal dispute. The scammer somehow convinced PayPal the item I tried to buy was illegal/against PayPal ToS, which resulted in them banning *me* instead of the scammer.
On the other hand, I see an unknown charge on my credit-card, dispute with my bank, and it's handled.
No way on PayPal,venmo, or any company associated with Paypal... I got screwed over with an unauthorized transaction on my credit card that was attached to a PayPal account... They refused to acknowledge the transaction as unauthorized... My Credit Card that was charged (Amex) on the otherhand, reversed the transaction within 24hours
In fact a unique payment ID (e.g QR) to "push" payment is even safer. No redirect. That's how payment should be. Not an authorization given to pull from us, but the agency for us to push the amount.
This is exactly what India's UPI (Unified Payments Interface) works. No PII, just a UPI ID is given and the user gets a push notification in Android/iOS app for approval (with PIN or security enclave like fingerprint).
In fact, there is EPC code, but it is rarely used and bank support is abysmal, at least in our country. But that can also be because we have some homegrown local standard for payment QR codes (and a new one in the works, lol).
If I am understanding you correct, isn't this what UPI does already?
How does the website know which bank to redirect to?
A dropdown is offered and the choice is remembered.
Making a note of this as an obvious technical alliance that should have existed for decades.
as it was the case in Baltic states since forever. Payments with CC came much later.
> I shouldn't have to fill in any card numbers on the site of the merchant (which is unsafe). Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system.
To be honest with multiple banks in Germany, without Wero, works like that too..
iDeal is terrible for fraud. Consumers have to file a police report.
I'm annoyed by redirects that won't work if you set a different default browser or incognito mode as default for new tabs. Total BS.
Card numbers just work.
Also, payment "apps" that pack their own web engine and need 300-500 megs D/L, plus refuse to run on rooted / "unvetted" systems. No fucks given! Go away, give a browser and numbers.
If you don't set a default browser, you'll be prompted what browser to open redirects and such in every time.
Unfortunately you still can't easily distinguish between normal browsing and private browsing that way (though browsers could implement that in theory), but I ran that setup for a while back when Firefox couldn't integrate with the App Tabs or whatever it's called where Android apps have their own minimal UI around a full screen web view (which used to always be Chrome).
Card numbers don't work because the business receiving the payment doesn't automatically get a signal from the bank when payments come in without an annoyingly complicated banking integration, which is exactly what these new services intend to solve. They do work for the consumer in some cases, and I have been paying for some online services with regular old bank transfers in cases where I didn't need a payment to go through the same day. That doesn't mean it's an equivalent system in most cases.
If your banking app doesn't run on your device because of something as silly as root detection, you should find a better bank.
Perfect opportunity for browser or OS API to provide the feature, where we could make it more streamlined, secure, and consistent.
I like the friction to decide against frivolous spending...
> Wero is basically an EU-wide version of the Dutch iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work.
For some reason, most Dutch people are convinced that the way things work in the Netherlands is the gold standard of how things should work in general, and are very hostile to solutions from other countries even if those solutions are better by any sensible metric. This is especially painful when a less developed country does leaps around NL in some aspect, like:
1. In Poland, you don't need to carry any documents with you because if policeman stops you, he has access the police database anyway. This includes driving license.
2. Even if you really want to show a document, you can do it gasp on your phone screen with the official government app.
3. Albert Heijn, the most popular supermarket chain, started accepting Visa and MasterCard in 2023. Not in 2003, in fucking 2023.
4. The adoption of paczkomaty is pathetic and when you have a delivery the expectation is that you're supposed to sit and wait the entire day at home.
5. iDeal launched 2005. Przelewy24 launched in 2004. They function in exactly the same way.
> A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment.
Have you seen the new money app? It's on Tubu. It's on Weeno. I'm on Dippy but my friend is on Poob. Poob has it for you.
Frenchman here, living in Spain. This speaks to me on many levels. Bizum is so integrated in my daily life in Spain, that I wished my french friends had it when we need to transfer money between each other. Looks like we're going in that direction. Phenomenal
> > A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment.
SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.
I doubt so, because i need to type god-knows-how-many characters by hand, while visually separating them into chunks by 4, then explicitly authorize the receiver. Oh, and explicitly authorise the country
> then explicitly authorize the receiver. Oh, and explicitly authorise the country
I've never had to do any of this, and I quire frequently send SEPA payments from Latvia.
While your complaint is valid, no need to separate in chunks, there's a checksum.
Yes, the only difference is that you need to communicate your bank account number and likely your legal name.
> you need to communicate your bank account number
in Latvia we need to do this for domestic payments anyway. We use IBAN even for domestic payments..
> and likely your legal name.
not mandatory. If provided, the bank tells you whether the recipient name matches the account, but if not, you can proceed with the payment anyway.
which... isn't really a problem for legal transfers, is it
Wero and Bizum are built on top of SEPA anyway
LOL thank you domain squatters. I can't think of any other reason why startups often always have the most ridiculous names.
A lot of these are puns/vague money sounding names in different languages.
Wero has got to be the worst of the bunch, though. An awkward combination of "we" and "euro" combined with "vero". At least the other pooq/wolo/snivum/rumio like names aren't trying to hard.
As terrible as these are, at least they aren't just random short English words.
It’s not just the domain squatters. They have to find a name they can get with Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc in addition to the domain.
I don't think it explains the "cat walks on keyboard" brand names for cheap Chinese goods on Amazon.
The gibberish brand names on Amazon are a formulaic way to streamline trademark registration which Amazon requires for some features on their selling platform.
I wonder if a name with CJK characters can be trademarked?
Yes, they can. I suspect latin characters are used for practical reasons: compatibility with US expectations... some systems only accept latin characters and certainly your US customers wouldn't be able to search for chinese language characters.
Nothing more reliable than good old SPLARGLE kitchenware
I think they just use random generators to make a 5 digit string and ship it
Every single 3 and 4 letter .com domain has been registered for at least 20 years, not a single one is available to register. Domains aren’t the reason for names like “wiro” and “tubi”.
Yeah its a bit bad LLLL.com are all taken I do have k4qr.com but its LNLL.
On the other hand though, there are still .org and .net if you are lucky.
I usually just use tld-list.com to find all the domains from a particular keyword and then you can buy one which can be nice (eg: I bought https://mirror.forum this way)
that being said, you can find the registration prices to sometimes be cheap but the renewal prices can be double the .com or more (which is around 8-10$)
For my domain of https://use.expert its renewal is around 40-50$ (4x .com price) but probably worth it as I really love it but I might drop a few domains like mirror.forum as its 20$ just doesn't feel worth it to me and I will just auction it in some forums, not really that sure at the moment
So TLDR: you can find some good names if really need be but the idea generally for these startups is to do something similar to what I am saying and then buy the .com later if/when they have the funds, personally I am not that big of a fan of .com but I do realize that I have more chances of remembering .com's because that's the default expectation of the internet.
Sounds totally fine to me. I guess just like there are many Mastodon instances: mastodon.social, fosstodon, infosec.exchange, mas.to, etc., but one protocol by which they talk to each other.
I’m 50. All startup news looks like this:
“Payments via Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy launch new startup.”
It's better than that trend of taking English words and removing the final vowels before "r" or some other consonant.
I'm not actually sure Wubi and Tubu are better than something like Cashr tbh
Or adding "-ly" at the end.
"Just use Cashly!" "Download Crditly"
Obliteratr
Obltrtr
I can feel Galactus's pain.
ahahah!
so true. those names are silly. also, French and Spanish can already send money for free via IBAN / SEPA
That's not the point at all. Currently I'm using paypal to send money to friends when we split dinner or share other costs. I'd like to use a similar European service instead and not go through a ceremony to open my banking app, initiate transfer, write the recipient's IBAN, confirm and wait a day for the transfer to take place.
You shouldn't need to wait for a day, instant transfers have been a thing for a while now. Unless you're in terribly bad luck to be stuck with one of the few banks that are lagging behind.
International money transfers, even between currencies, now take seconds whenever I do them.
The "map phone number to bank account" services do make this whole thing a lot easier, but on the other hand I kind of don't want to help scammers by giving them the option to look up what bank they need to pretend to be before dialing a number.
Entering an IBAN once in a blue moon is a cheap price to pay to not be the US's bitch imho
I split bills via Revolut?
I could do it via IBAN and it would mostly (not to all banks) instant.
My bank also allows payments via a phone number now. Tested once and it works, but everyone's used to Revolut for bill splitting here in Romania.
Wero and Bizum mostly just associate phone numbers to IBANs and perform instant SEPA transfers underneath. The benefit is that you only need the other's phone number to send them money, usually already in your contact list, instead of them sharing you a twenty-something digit number.
Ah yes, Pierre will surely have no issues paying for his baguette et croissant by filling in the boulangerie's IBAN on his mobile phone and waiting 15 minutes for them to check receipt.
We have instant bank transfers in Europe. And you can scan a QR code for payment via IBAN.
When Canada legalized weed in 2018, the US administration made it clear that they can ban Canadians from the US for life if they have used marijuana in the past. The administration alluded to looking at Canadian's transaction history to facilitate cracking down on this more harshly[1].
It was so clear at that point to me how badly sovereign payments and banking is so needed. FATCA is a thing, I get it, I get the motivation- but allow another country to wield a "cooperation" like a weapon to attack Canada's sovereignty is just further evidence that we need to safeguard our data.
One silver lining of the current U.S. regime's behaviour is how it's forcing us to move out of the local minima of over-Americanization that we've been stuck in for too long.
As an American, I'm so glad America is finally crumbling from its position of power. Americans need a wake up call because our insane hubris and stubbornness is responsible for so much of the bad stuff in the world.
Another American here, I find these self loathing kind of posts to be so sophomoric and embarrassing
A European here, I find this kind of ignorance both hilarious and frightening.
If you come across a fellow citizen expressing dismay at the way your country has conducted itself, the appropriate response is a bit of introspection perhaps and some debate about why they might feel that way. Not more arrogance and outright denial.
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Does the same sentiment apply to TN1 visas? Funny how you never see those burned in protest
That's my point, right?
We've had such a closely integrated economy and it's been a win-win for a very long time. Whether it's resources like lumber or manufacturing like Ontario/Michigan, or massive amounts of fuel refinement, we're so closely interconnected that we've needed that ease of cross-border travel for work. A consequence is that our industry hasn't evolved as much as it could have. We're sitting on an enormous amount of natural resources and technical competence that we've been feeding in to American companies forever, because we were reaping sufficient profits.
What the current regime could absolutely do is force us further from that local minima by throwing a tantrum over TN1 visas.
I work with a lot of Americans so I know they understand deeply: changing careers out of principle is a rare luxury very few can act on. Especially when you depend on your employer for healthcare (though we don't suffer that mistake as much). I wouldn't expect people to voluntarily quit their jobs the same way they are voluntarily stopping U.S. recreational travel in record numbers [1].
Are you kinda alluding that if it was so bad in the US, people wouldn’t be asking for TN1 visas to go work there?
What makes you think EU will not look into it and block us from buying “bad things”?
Do you think that is a retort in some way?
EU residents have a say over the EU. Canadians have a say over the Canadian government. We do not have a say over a nuclear-armed idiocracy forcing it's profound corruption and stupidity on other sovereign entities.
For instance right now the US, in defending their war-crime boss Israel, has sanctioned judges of the ICC, including Canadians, Europeans, etc. Any US firm enforcing such a sanction should be booted from operating in all of those countries. Which is precisely why Visa and Mastercard are soon going to be a busted, provincial, US-only concern. Well, maybe they'll have it in the great nation of Venezuela as well.
Like American DUIs?
what until you understand what is next, cdbc and restricted digital money. Enjoy it.
I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you all that Wero is called Wero because Euro is pronounced "you-ro" and when you share your you-ro it becomes a we-ro.
Unless you're in Germany, when it's more like "oy-ro"... and Wero would be pronounced "ve-ro"... I don't think there's a German pun hiding here!
And when anything goes wrong, that's a ruh-ro.
What's wrong with good old uh-oh??
That's good too, my brain just likes the way Scooby-Doo says it.
Internet comment of the day awarded to CharlesW.
There's supposedly also an Italian pun based on "vero" in there.
I've heard pretty much every European English-as-a-second-language speaker pronounced the W differently, though, and pronunciation of the E isn't even consistent within native English populations. I can't wait for the "vee-ro? oh, you mean whay-ro" discussions between tourists and stores.
It will for sure be pronounced Véro in French :)
Ouiro does sound pretty ridiculous to be honest
> Euro is pronounced "you-ro"
This in not true for everywhere that uses the Euro, unsurprisingly because that encompasses a large linguistic area. I know for a fact France doesn't pronounce it that way.
Never realized this, mind blown :-)
Hmm Euro is actually pronounced roughly like yeuroh (like voyeur); not you-roh, and by the normal heuristics of English at least Wero would likely be pronounced more like weir-oh than wee-ro.
I guess it doesn't have to be perfect to make a funny name though.
When I give someone money I don't feel like I'm sharing it at all. Sounds like it goes from a "my-oh" to a "your-oh" and is aptly named from the jump.
(In French.)
That could be a massive hassle for American tourists, who will still mostly have Visa and Mastercard. I'm sure that there will be some kind of solution -- I suspect Google Pay and Apple Pay will support the new network. But I'll have to keep an eye out.
I might even have to start bringing cash. I used to make that the very first thing I did on landing. The last few times I didn't get any cash at all.
This is the EU equivalent of Zelle, but pushing into merchant payments and owned and run by the banks.
When the telcos tried to compete with the cloud providers by offering OpenStack they learned the business wasn't as simple as offering 10-15 services with some racks. I can imagine the same hidden complexity for payment rails
On the other hand regulations have taken too much power away from merchants and Wero could succeed with more merchant friendly terms. They are doing 3-legged payments so they are not subject to as many European regulations as Visa/Mastercard.
We already have SEPA payments in the EU. The path has been paved.
UK Open Banking is a counter example to this argument. It’s been a huge success. Transfers between accounts are seamless, and I never need to authorize Plaid to maintain a permanent session in a headless Chromium instance reading my bank account. The APIs are well-defined, universally supported, and include authorization scopes for viewing balance, authorizing transfers, etc.
That said, I don’t do many p2p payments in the UK (mostly because I’m an adult now, not splitting every bill like I was in college). And I wouldn’t like to add every one of my friends to my banking transfer history. The UK is missing something like Venmo with wide adoption. I assume the kids these days mostly use features like Apple Cash or Monzo transfers.
I have not heard about UK Open Banking rails for merchants being popular. You are talking about P2P? the article is about challenging Visa/Mastercard.
Payments are much more complicated than just who your issuer is. As noted in other comments, connecting the customer directly to the aquirer can lose significant functionality. Pre authorization, installments, card on file and other typical services may be offered differently than expected, or not at all.
In addition, Mastercard and Visa still write the rules for industry. If at some point advanced Mastercard or Visa 3ds security significantly reduce fraud, and thus rates, consumers may start paying more for issuers that dont support similar technologies.
On top of all of this, point of interaction device support may lag. The latest features from Ignenico and such may take a while to implement, or again may not be supported at all for smaller financial companies.
All that being said, it’s great for consumers to have the choice, and hopefully we all benefit from increased competition.
Disclaimer: I work for a Payment Gateway
The damage this admin has done to the USA as a whole, so far, is astounding. It's good for Europe to decouple from the USA, but I'm sure the folks at Visa and Mastercard aren't thrilled.
As interesting as this is, it kinda sucks that on Android this is supposed to be locked behind DroidGuard, meaning that you are effectively still stuck with the duopoly unless you are willing to run an unmodified phone or microG happens to be winning the game of whack-a-mole that day.
This is written from a French perspective as if southern countries joined later because they were not as developed. Quite the opposite. Spain, Italy and Portugal were in the first years of EPI, but they went there own ways because of the lack of progress that was being made by other members like France and Germany. Bizum in Spain is quite popular (I would say that more than Wero in France) and now is starting to manage payments in physical stores, after being a popular solution to transfer money between friends and in online payments (and in the physical black market).
You must be very poor at reading French because the article says the exact opposite, and that Spain, Portugal, Italy and Andorra served as test subjects since they already have this system called EuroPA.
Banks in Spain, Italy and Portugal are joining what this article describes as France’s Wero system [1]. («L'initiative française Wero».)
Focus this year is on P2P transfers. Commerce is targeted for 2027. Given EuroPA has done a token amount of transactions to date, I’m not sure anyone should hold their breaths.
> Given EuroPA has done a token amount of transactions to date, I’m not sure anyone should hold their breaths.
The Spanish equivalent (Bizum) is merging into Wero is not a token use case, it's absolutely massive here. The absolute standard for peer-to-peer payments, more than 30 million users (>65% of the population), and they already launched contactless terminals for in-person commercial payments this month (https://euroweeklynews.com/2026/04/03/bizum-goes-contactless...).
Indeed Bizum is almost default now here in Spain, and for instance the equivalent in Sweden, Swish, is also almost default there. Went trekking into a national park, and the rangers will leave a number to Swish a bit of money if you want to use the fire pits; no other payment means.
I wouldn't say Swish is the default in Sweden because it doesn't support contactless payments. It is widely available though but many, many places only accept card/contactless payments. Of course, Swish is the default for person-to-person transfers, but not for payments.
Opposite is also true, some lower-value places (like fruitstands, street vendors) don't accept card/contactless because they don't want to pay visa mastercard fee.
I have no numbers but I would guess at least 50% of non-cash transactions are still card/contactless. I wouldn't be surprised if this number is 90%.
Wero is not French, but it has replaced France's Paylib. It's pretty awesome and seems to quickly have replaced all other apps (Lydia, PayPal) for small payments in my friend and family circles. I'm excited to see it expand to PoS payments.
From what I understand, Wero is identical to iDeal, which has been the standard Dutch internet payment system for decades. So I'm a bit surprised to see France claim ownership.
Wero is a initiative of a collection of banks from a handful of countries. Every country already had something like this, in some form of another, and now all these systems are getting merged into a common system.
No single country can claim ownership because it's an EU initiative. iDeal was one of the first and relatively easy systems across the EU, but it's hardly the predecessor.
Wero also does peer-to-peer transfers which iDeal doesn't (unless you use iDeal to pay for tikkies but that's still two apps). The new system is not just an iDeal rebranding.
> Wero also does peer-to-peer transfers which iDeal doesn't
Directly, without Tikkie? That's really interesting. I wasn't aware of that yet. My impression was indeed mostly a rebranding and expansion of iDeal.
Can you confirm people in france actually use wero? I had heard of it every so often but basically zero people actually use it, my revolut app has a feature to use wero but never used it. I mean would be great, getting rid of CC fees could literally lower grocery prices by 1-2%.
I use it for basically every payment with friends.
The greatest force of Wero is that, being from a bank consortium and not "another app", you can send money to people that don't even know the system exists as long as you have their phone number because the money will go straight to the bank account registered with this phone number.
You don't need to register to the service to receive money so basically anyone holding an account in a compatible bank can receive funds instantly. Which means, as the person sending the money, you don't have to tell your friends to install it.
I can only speak from my experience, but yes, multiple people (a few friends, people at work, and my uncle) have suggested to "make [me] a Wero" lately to pay me back small amounts. The fact that's it's integrated into the existing banking apps helps.
Every single friend to friend transfer around me is done via wero these days. And between business SEPA more and more.
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iDeal is an enormous success in the Netherlands so if banks implement it as well in other countries then it will definitely be competitive with credit cards for online payments
Wero is the pan-European successor to ideal. Other countries had something similar. We are now converging on using the same technique and mechanism everywhere. It also takes a bite out of payment providers like adyen because they managed the different payment methods for shops. In the future you only need to use Wero.
iDeal is in the process of being replaced by Wero, which is pretty cool!
Wero sounds weirdo, but iDeal sounds like a confession you sell drugs.
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Ehm. Wero is partially based on the Dutch iDEAL system, which has been hugely successful.
Pretty much all purchases from Dutch webshops are paid through iDEAL as well as many P2P payments. It's also supported by international payment services (iirc Stripe and Shopify).
If they manage to replicate it in other European countries, Werk will be huge. Moreover, it's supported by many banks.
I wish Wero was a real alternative but it seem to be a thin wrapper around Bank APIs and SEPA instant transactions. It has pretty much non of the functionality that PayPal or other services give. It just makes it easier to send money with a phone number instead of an IBAN. My bank doesn't even support it.
Isn't a wrapper making the ergonomics better valuable enough?
In Sweden we have Swish for domestic transfers, if I could use Swish (or if Wero took it over) the same way to transfer money to my friends living in other EU countries I'd be very, very happy.
What kind of functionality PayPal offers that is much better? Using cards instead of direct debit?
That’s what EMPSA[1] is trying to push. But Swish aren’t particularly interested in playing an active part.[2]
Vipps which is available in Sweden supports this system.
I know the Swedish government is also pressuring swish to integrate with vipps. So I guess you'll have this ability soon.
> non of the functionality that PayPal or other services give
What functionality are you looking for exactly?
I use paypal to transfer money to other accounts & pay for online shopping, possibly in other valuta. In my opinion Wero (earlier I used IDeal) is easier then paypal for this purpose
> What functionality are you looking for exactly?
* Buyer protection
* Obfuscation of my banking data (IBAN)
* Having access to it with my bank
* Not needing to share my contact list
At the moment I don't see much improvement over an instant SEPA transaction. Since both parties will see each other's IBAN anyways with Wero I can just give out my IBAN.
Isn't that much better than PayPal? Why would i want my money to end up in some intermediate PayPal account?
Isn't the whole point of existence of WERO that European banks got scared of digital Euro and started implementing something to get in the market first?
> My bank doesn't even support it.
It's not like it's that difficult to implement. Most Brazilian banks implemented a similar protocol in months.
What's the benefit of this over contactless payments?
It works over the internet.
How does it work when you need to pay for something in person? (what contactless is for)
That's what you use contactless for. Different systems have different purposes. Although people have also been known to use Tikkie or other payment request systems for in-person payments. Backed by iDeal, or now Wero.
In some countries there is a payment system that works by generating QR codes at checkout and scanning those with your phone. I don't know if Wero intends to also support those, but it could make for a direct integration into live checkout.
I think the Digital Euro initiative is closer to replacing contactless payments than Wero is, but it'll depend on the country I think.
iDeal supports scanning of QR codes, so I assume Wero does too.
IMHO, QR codes are a big step back from contactless and appeared in countries that didn't have widespread card adoption (e.g. China),
QR codes aren't a replacement for contactless. Contactless will stay, although unfortunately Dutch banks have recently discontinued their own contactless payment system and moved to Google Pay, which was a terrible decision.
You use your bank card or contact less payment from your bank app.
Optionally you scan or get send a payment request, and pay through Wero.
QR codes for now, unfortunately.
I'll be happy when we get credit cards without a visa or mastercard logo
What does this mean for travel if Visa is not “everywhere you want to be”?
I can’t tell if this is going to replace Visa/Mastercard or be offered in addition to Visa/Mastercard to handle transactions for locals while still allowing transactions to be viable for everyone else who might be passing through.
It means that businesses who accept cards will have a great advantage against businesses who think they are smart by making life difficult for customers.
> What does this mean for travel if Visa is not “everywhere you want to be”?
You'll live life as if you had AMEX instead.
I really want this initiative to succeed. MBway a participant in it, is perhaps one of the most useful apps I ever had on my phone. Extending its functionality to all of Europe would be outstanding. Especially if I can then use it online on international websites.
Totally misleading. Without reading all of it: MAYBE it means: it is/will be enabled for 130m people.
And even those of us who have activated it, have hardly used it for the most part, or hve concerns.
No, it's already 130M (out of the ~450M in the EU). Wero's predecessor (iDeal, Bizum, Paylib, Giropay) systems are already widely adapted in their countries of origin and will be fully compatible with it, and Wero itself has had a bit of time to pick up new users on its own by now.
The use is very high (daily) in my social circles these days. No more IBAN sharing. Non tech are on it. YMMV
It was weird to see them bragging about €6MM volume in the first year.
That number must be wrong? Swish volume during one month was €4759MM as comparison.
I can't imagine that 6 million number is the total volume.
Given that each participating country already had existing payment systems, perhaps that number is just international payments?
Pretty much was already available via SEPA. We had a similar system in the Netherlands called ideal which has now been subsumed by Wero to join an European alternative. In the end the idea is simple. All participating bank accounts have lorum/nostrum accounts for the pairs. Whenever the Wero transaction succeeds the money is wired internally directly. I’m not sure whether this mechanism will be replaced by SEPA direct debit entirely.
Too bad that, for Italy, BancomatPay joined instead of Satispay, an app that's actually used (especially in the North). Almost nobody uses BancomatPay.
Satispay is no longer really used anymore.
It was only welcomed by merchants in the 0-fee era, now no merchant cares anymore as Satispay is no longer free of charge and pulled the rug.
And to send payments across friends there's instant bank wires (often free of charge), and even when it's not instant it is executed in few hours-one working day max which isn't a big issue when you're transferring money across friends.
> And to send payments across friends there's instant bank wires
That's nice (when it's free), but banking apps are clunky, unfriendly, heavy and slow. Unicredit and Intesa, two main Italian banks, both have apps that are atrocious to use and riddled with annoyances.
People want an easy and quick way to send/receive money (Satispay does that almost well).
And for some banks Wero seems like it's going to be available through your existing bank app. Which is a no-go for me.
> That's nice (when it's free), but banking apps are clunky, unfriendly, heavy and slow.
They are all fine for a simple wire transfer.
I do have Intesa myself cause I've got mortgage through them and sending a wire transfer is both simple and fast.
So is on our other accounts: BBVA (Italian), mBank (Polish), Credem (Italian), Mediobanca (IT) and XTB and Revolut (both PL and IT).
I think you're really describing a 10 year old non-issue.
That's a pretty optimistic take. I'm a bit more cautious myself: The motivation is obviously higher than ever, but it's hardly a done deal.
There are still many obstacles ahead: Contactless payments (Apple does not provide any card emulation NFC access to the Apple Watch, for example, and only limited access to iPhones), chargeback handling, offline payments (a recent priority of the EU under the larger umbrella of digital resiliency), and of course the network effect of the existing millions of terminals, ATMs, and cards in the field.
But does this act like a debit account?
What I like about a credit card are things like you are buying on credit, not using money in your account directly. So in the case of fraud or issue a chargeback it's been much easier to get credit card transactions reverted rather than get money put back into my debit account.
Also I like credit cards for the rewards, cash back or especially travel points. But also things like extended warranty coverage and other perks.
> But does this act like a debit account?
Yeah, it's a debit account. I'm in Spain and use Bizum frequently. It's just a "pay from your bank account" system.
You mostly type in your phone number, get a notification (or text, depends on the bank) and open up your banking app and approve the transaction.
You can send money person to person as well.
Many European countries have a similar system. Wero is "just" stitching the national systems together into a EU wide one.
Credit cards with rewards and points are pretty rare in Europe, and if they do exist, pale in comparison to what you can get in the US/Canada. It depends on how you look at it, but it's kinda good. The EU caps credit card transaction fees at 0.3% and debit transactions at 0.2% iirc, versus in the US/Canada where they are frequently 2-3%. In theory this cost is just passed onto the consumer, so paying an extra 2-3% to get 2-3% back in points or whatever.
> Also I like credit cards for the rewards, cash back or especially travel points. But also things like extended warranty coverage and other perks.
Much of this is funded by inflated interchange fees paid by merchants (and thus inflating the cost of goods for everyone). Ideally you would just pay for the added value you see (fraud protection, charge disputes, supplemental insurance) rather than those costs being externalized to other buyers.
Wero uses your existing debit account, it's not a separate account.
I'm legitimately curious how these American payment companies held onto their worldwide dominance for so long. I'm used to seeing the sign at restaurants of all the other cards they accept, but for so long I've only ever seen Amex, Discover, Visa, and Mastercard in folks' hands.
There is a huge first movers advantage on infrastructure.
Additionally until recently most political parties and people in the EU didn't see this as national security related infrastructure. That's why it was allowed to be privatized and handled by external companies. There is a lot more critical digital infrastructure that is being moved away from. Think Microsoft office suite, operating systems, cloud systems and more.
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Bank deals, especially in Europe where debit cards is more popular than credit the issuing banks preferred deals largely dictate what network you'll be on.
Its simple: they have deals with all the big banks who issue the popular cards with all of the rewards, so those are the cards people get.
geopolitics, dollar, and then network effect. in that order.
What bearing does the dollar have on any of this exactly?
What do you mean? How it cannot? In Europe's context, 60's and 70's, was a collection of fractured dozens of small countries each with its own currency. US had a single currency which was also world's reserve currency so every major bank on this planet already had to build technical and legal pipelines to handle global trade. On top of that you had US omnipresence in post WW2 Europe and world for that matter. American payment networks were the fastest and obvious place to build payment networks across all those borders which was then also a footing ground into intra-market payments. As I said - geopolitics, dollar, network effect in that order. Can't have one without the other.
Banks can settle with Visa and Mastercard in their currency of choice, so I don't see why the dollar matters for any of that.
And regarding Visa and Mastercard being US payment networks: This is now undoubtedly the case, but for much of their history, their EU subsidiaries were actually independent cooperatives owned by large European network member banks. They only sold their respective stakes to the US parent organizations in the late 90s, back when European banks, in a pretty severe blunder, considered cards a thing of the past of no importance for the future.
Amex is not very popular in Europe. Discover... I am not sure, not that much.
Visa and MasterCard are everywhere though
Really depends on the country. Discover acceptance is actually relatively good globally, as they have interconnections to Diners Club, JCB and China UnionPay.
Equivalent PIX is very popular in Brazil for instant payments.
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So this is basically the EU version of Zelle? Basically a way to transfer money between parties who already have established trust. Am I understanding that correctly?
But I am confused about how this relates to Visa and Mastercard. Those systems are used for payments between parties that have not necessarily established trust.
> So this is basically the EU version of Zelle?
Yes, but more importantly, it's essentially the EU version of Alipay (which can be used for merchant payments as well as P2P transactions).
P2P payments, specifically SEPA Instant bank transfers, have already been instant and free for several years now in the EU, so there's no need for a Zelle alternative (other than maybe for contact discovery without IBAN).
And speaking of Alipay: This is the actual global alternative to Visa and Mastercard that almost nobody in the west is talking about or even aware of. While it used to be mainly used by either inbound or outbound tourists in/from China, it now spans many countries and issuing and merchant banks all over the world, including many in Europe. Wero is many years behind in that regard.
Yes Wero and Zelle are similar: real-time payment systems, where money is sent directly from bank account to bank account, and recipients are looked up with a convenient ID (a phone number, or an email).
It's a an all-in-one kind of system where you have p2p payments and traditional online payments (like what you would do when making payment for a product on some e-commerce shop).
Plus some additional features like payments through QR.
I wonder if at some point we’ll be start taking about non-smartphone sovereign payments. The main reason I still use card is to be able to use it without a phone, and the technology of debit cards (around Europe at least) is quite OK. Maybe Europe should have a parallel payment track that is just a new card brand.
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Wero rides on SEPA SCT Inst, already mandatory EU-wide. P2P will land
fast; merchant displacement is hard because card interchange funds the
chargeback layer SEPA doesn't replicate.
The title is definitely an over-exaggeration. "Goodbye" will happen when Europeans going abroad no longer need to take Visa or Mastercard cards with them.
What is currently happening is the solving of instant cross-border P2P transfers, which sounds like a very niche problem. Online payments are mostly a solved problem because payment gateways like Adyen or Stripe already support local payment systems.
When we need that, we can use Apple/Android pay in many many places or just spin up a temporary visa/mastercard with platforms like Revolut.
Spoiler: Europeans use whatever their banks provide.
That's the thing, European banks provide Wero, or a system that integrates with Wero. Or Swish, but integration between the two is inevitable in the future.
This whole "new" ecosystem is just gluing together existing national digital payment solutions so it can be used internationally.
It's already on my bank app since a couple of week, but I haven't tried it yet.
Who cares at this point. Nothing has ever managed to unite Europeans as effectively as the orange man’s unrelenting torrent of temper tantrums over the past year and a half.
Americans, we know some of you aren’t crazy. Can’t wait for the grown-ups to be in charge again, but in the mean time we’ll be moving on.
Here's the thing: the grown-ups are in charge now. It's just that all spoiled, bratty children are too entitled to notice. It's like a scene from a movie where a serious teacher gets assigned to a class of misfits - no matter what the teacher does right, they'll always be "wrong".
> Who cares at this point. Nothing has ever managed to unite Europeans as effectively as the orange man’s unrelenting torrent of temper tantrums over the past year and a half.
> Americans, we know some of you aren’t crazy. Can’t wait for the grown-ups to be in charge again, but in the mean time we’ll be moving on.
Assuming by "grown-ups" you mean Team Blue, then you'll be disappointed, because they manufactured consent for "orange man" every step of the way. People are too easily fooled by the good cop / bad cop routine, which is why it's continuously deployed.
We have a uniparty with red and blue facades whose illusion apparently even pervades overseas. Buckle in for disappointment no matter where you live. As if your country doesn't have similar power struggles.
It's capital interests against everybody else. Always has been. "Lesser of two evils" is still evil.
OK Doomer.
Does that thought-terminating cliche still work on people?
This is just more trite "Muh both sides" doomerism.
No it isn't.
It's safe to assume you've either drunk the kool-aid or have something to gain monetarily (even if falsely assumed) by allowing the illusion to persist. Either way, you're literally part of the problem, as is anyone else who still takes this system seriously.
Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. Trump and Obama are the same.
Nobody said same. In fact, on a surface level, they're easy to view as polar opposites. One must critically examine beneath the surface to see how they're both on the same team (capital).
What about sanders, mamdani, aoc? Or are they just fringe candidates and don’t count? For every AOC there are a dozen Schumers I guess. But I disagree with your thesis because there are factions of ethical capitalists in the democratic party that have never existed in the modern Republican Party.
As a former Sanders supporter, it became clear that even though Bernie was likely acting in good faith, the establishment used all of their levers politically and in capital-controlled media to limit him to the role of controlled opposition. Emphasis on "controlled."
> ethical capitalists
That is not a coherent concept, especially in late stage capitalism.
America: You need to be more self sufficient and not lean on us so much!
Europe: <launches European payment initiative>
America: NOT LIKE THAT!!!
Just to add a little bit more context, European interbanking initiatives are older than Trump insanity. What we are seeing at play is a slow decades-old strategy finally bearing fruits. Though Trump is for sure a factor pushing for adoption.
I'm pretty sure European governments know that and are prepared to deal with the temper tantrum.
Which country in Europe is prepared to deal with anything? They can’t even break away from the country currently invading them
Europe is dealing with the US, just not via empty threats on social media. Things take time when you have a functioning democratic system with checks and balances.
A bit rich on an article showing we are precisely breaking away, topic by topic, to something which is more balanced.
I wouldn't be so sure, at least not this administration. Fragmented monetary systems provide more opportunities for creative accountants and that's something the people running everything in the US seem to benefit from.
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This action is a response to the tariff regime imposed by the US. The current administration decided that it was going to use its role as the leader of the global hegemon to threaten and coerce other countries, and actions like this are a result. The American government can threaten them all they want, problem is that they've been threatening everyone since Day 1.
> “How can I decouple from the US as fast as possible?” is what this leads to.
> Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock. The US will apply pressure for short term gain against allies while they move away long term.
Just for context, it looks very much the same as Fast Payment System in Russia. Been a thing for some 10 years, and huge amount of retail works on it.
How does it compare to the digital euro, isn't it better?
Is there an english version of this?
Dumb question for those EU folks ...
How do you use this when paying online?
Is there the equivalent of an "Apple Pay" button on merchant website for those based in EU?
(Or a Pix button, when in Brazil, etc?)
A "Pay with PIX" button is just a QR code. You reach the payment page, the merchant website generates a QR code, you open up your bank app, scan the QR code, confirm the merchant and the purchase, then the merchant website runs a spinner for like 10 seconds while it confirms it in the background and you get a confirmation.
The merchant typically uses stripe or adyen or whatever (mollie has a cute name!), a payment service provider or PSP.
The PSP looks at what methods the merchant wants to accept, which methods the user could potentially be using (based on e.g. country by geo IP or some delivery location) and show the relevant icons.
EU users will see schemes like wero or Przelewy24, Japanese customers will see 'konbini' among the icons, and US users may only see credit cards, Apple Pay and Affirm. There are TONS of payment services. Stripe lists 123 of them.
The merchant will want to exclude methods that have high costs (for themselves), maybe they also care about their customers not getting into debt (so no buy-now-pay-later or credit), and some payment methods have higher rates of disputes/chargebacks (e.g. Amex).
In general, most merchants will want to offer as many methods as possible to prevent consumers who have a preference (this week) for using account A over account B from bouncing.
Yes at the pay page there's a 'pay by X' list of options, you choose it.
You then typically have two choices: scan QR with your phone or login to your bank.
I normally open my bank app on my phone which signs in via my face (iPhone), I then press the scan button (first screen), point at my phone at the screen to read the QR code, the transaction pops up on my phone, I press confirm and again it signs via my face. Then you're done.
If you were shopping on the phone it's even simpler of course as the pay button opens up the transaction in your bank app right away, but typically I shop on my laptop after research.
I've had this for almost 20 years by the way in the Netherlands, but now it's pivoted to the EU standard.
Go to store, select "pay by Wero". Get redirected to payment screen where I select my bank. My bank just shows a QR code that I scan with my bank app, authenticate the usual way, redirect back to store, job done.
In Portugal there's often a "MB Way" payment option - which AFAICT is the PT version of these other systems.
Do Visa/Mastercard make much money in Europe? Most people use debit cards. I’m admittedly not clear on how exchange fees work for those.
Debit cards have scheme fees and interchange rates just like credit cards. Interchange rates for credit and debit cards in the EU are actually very comparable and both very low, which is very different from many other parts of the world (e.g. in the US, debit interchange is effectively a flat fee per transaction).
Visa and Mastercard make money on scheme fees paid to them by both issuers and acquirers (i.e. indirectly merchants), not interchange.
There's an indirect impact of lower interchange rates, as issuers will usually not be willing to pay more than 100% of what they're earning in interchange in scheme fees. Acquirers have no such implicit limit, though.
They make buttloads. Debit cards still require a cut for VISA/MasterCard.
I suppose some added sovereignty is to be expected when your closest ally extorts, threatens annexation and slams you with tariffs.
Too bad cryptocurrency never took off. Such a missed opportunity
Can't be a missed opportunity if it never took off.
People know what they like/dislike, and crypto payments didn't cut it for whatever reasons. UX, cost, and waiting for blockchain confirmations come to mind.
Cryptocurrency didn't actually solve the problems we have, while introducing problems we didn't need to solve, because almost all of them copied Bitcoin. The only problems it solved well was for grifter politicians and criminals skirting financial regulations.
Note this transfer mechanism requires trust in your banking provider, is not pseudo-anonymous, is not decentralised, uses the banking system we already have and doesn't require a whole new 'currency' in order to transfer money.
Good! Now please remove dependency of alphabet + apple for bank apps, and we're golden.
As political instability has shown, it is a bad idea to have all your payments go through a single, weaponizable, failure point in New York.
Europe needs to be functionally as independent as possible.
It’s kind of wild seeing American soft power evaporate like this. I didn’t think it was the kind of thing that would happen in my lifetime.
If they can make it as seamless as UPI, that would be incredible. UPI, imo, is the pinnacle of ease of internet payments - as seamless and quick as it can get.
Yes, every user just gets a handle with no personal or bank info revealed and off you go. User keys in a UPI ID in any merchant site/app, get a push notification for approval in mobile app. Can associate multiple bank accounts to a UPI ID underneath. Approval will ask which account to debit from too. Can't get simpler than this.
UPI would be even better if it were easier for tourists to onboard and use it while traveling in India. The general mindset seems to be that there's enough domestic tourism that making things easy for foreigners isn't that important. I think that really hurts the country's economy.
My comment was more centered around the UX of UPI. But to address your point, there is a separate app for tourists called UPI One World, works as a digital wallet and the UX is similar.
If only it were that simple! UPI One World isn't an app, it's a system that apps can implement, and the implementations, like Mony and Cheq, all have high fees and require you to go to random offices in inconvenient locations to verify your identity in person.
As far as I can tell, all of this is "OK" because the primary target market for UPI One World is NRIs - again, who needs foreign tourists?
Canada chiming in, Interac rules above anything else.
Interac should join this scheme outright or at least become interoperable with it. I'd love to be able to pay for everything on my trips to Europe without using US credit card networks.
I am a European (Czech Republic) and I have never heard of any of those (Epis/Bizum/Vipps).
They are generally country specific. But the underlying systems are made for interoperability. You might have an app with a different name in your country
Soon: "President Trump issued a new tariff today on all non-US payment systems, saying `We have the best protectionist economy in the world, it's really great`"
Please post in English. Chrome is unable to translate this page.
If it requires (or will require) Google/Apple authentication then it's of course not sovereign payment. It looks like Wero works on GrapheneOS, at least for now. Will that always be possible?
Will it always be smartphone only, or will there be other options?
I've read about the problems kids (eg, 10 year olds) are having in the countries which have gone mostly cash-free when they don't have a smartphone or debit card to use for otherwise normal and age-appropriate transactions.
I can't help but think that by switching even more of the economy to smartphone-based solutions then kids will have even more restricted purchasing autonomy.
To say nothing of people like me who don't have and don't want to have a smart phone.
once again the crypto shills - r left exposed.
pix as already proven in Brazil - is faster. this system again will be faster & secure & more convenient with less fees.
I really don't know what to do. I can't read so much. Bounce.
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Crypto broskis have been selling so many bullshit coins for this specific moment in time and failed.
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"sovereign" :D :D :D
In the EUSSR1
I thought crypto would have solved this ;-)
To be fair, crypto is anti-consumer.
I tried Wero just now. Crashes at once on my phone.
I run Lineage is, want backups on my own NAS. I have a feeling that if I want this European payment app I need to accept backing up my data on an American cloud.
(I've nothing against Google really. But I want my backups at home.)
Wero is basically an EU-wide version of the Dutch iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work. I shouldn't have to fill in any card numbers on the site of the merchant (which is unsafe). Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system. I've always been annoyed by the need to type in sensitive card info on all sorts of merchant sites. I hope that with EU-wide use, Wero will receive much broader support now.
PIX from Brazil is even better, to be honest. But this is a big improvement over online CC payment.
I lived in the NL and Brazil, so I can compare the two, and while iDEAL is pretty good, PIX is easier to understand, explain, and deal with.
PIX has more variants, you can use it for recurrent payment, split payments, financing, cashout and almost all things a CC can do nowadays.
I would say Tikkie is almost as good and easy to use as PIX usecase wise but has less adoption and variants, also it belongs to ABN which is completely different from PIX approach.
PIX is also better because it gives control back to the central bank (as it was with cash) and not private industry although they are providing the service. The central bank controls what payments are permitted by what laws exist, not some risk management system that has decided that your legal purchase is too risky or some foreign state has applied sanctions against you.
And that's the whole reason why Wero has been made I think. It's because the ECB wants to advance on their digital euro plans due to sovereignty concerns, and I think this push is to dismiss that argument.
That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.
> That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.
If you ever had your account blocked by Apple or Google, you know exactly why a government is the better option. At least you have the rule of law on your side.
Big companies are the authoritarian situation, not the government.
If you've ever read any history you'd know why a government is definitely not the better option.
It deems to me that the rule of law is easier to apply to third parties than to the government that is in charge of administering it
I trust my government (Switzerland) way more to do the thing that is right for the people and the law then some private company that has the primary goal of making money. It doesn't mean that governments don't make mistakes but the primary goal is to serve its people.
That is what government is for in a functioning democracy. A functioning government is of the people for the people.
The American mind cannot comprehend
I hope I get to live in such a place some day.
> I trust my government (Switzerland)
I do, too. I’m not sure I trust Brussels.
I certainly trust the EU a lot more than I trust US corporations.
Considering the head of EZB is a convicted criminal with, lets call it interesting, letters to the convicted criminal Sarkozy I am not sure what is plague and what cholera.
Taken into account than of two convicted criminals, Sarkozy went to prison and will probably be sent there again, whereas Trump is running a big country, I'm pretty sure which is which.
I guess it comes down to who you would trust more - your own government which you have some control over via elections or some (potentially multinational) corporation which you have exactly zero control over?
It's the other way around. You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad. You have very, very coarse-grained control with the government every few years.
> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad.
There are exactly two companies in the global credit card market and they operate in lockstep, literally coming to agreements to shut down legal businesses together. Visa and MasterCard have absolutely no right to determine who is and isn't allowed to receive payment. Governments have that right, but that doesn't mean they should use it -- if they're abusing that right, people can vote them out. The effectiveness of people voting out harmful politicians is another matter, but that's kind of on the people being bad at voting, not the idea of government altogether, and at any rate you have no vote whatsoever in what MC/Visa do (unless you vote for government to regulate them!).
> You have choice with a company,
This is wrong for a large share of the companies that most people deal with on a daily basis. And that share has been steadily increasing every single year.
Ok, I choose to not use Visa/Mastercard in the US, and I want to subscribe to some saas. What do I do now? Or do you mean "choice" as in "you can always choose not the breathe or eat"?
To be pedantic American Express and Discover exist.
But I agree with your meaning. We are beholden to some third party no matter how we move in the current situation.
Amex is regularly rejected by businesses and cannot be your only credit card, so really you maybe have Discover.
I also wouldn’t say either of those is particularly better than Visa/Mastercard. They all engage in the same practices more or less
The only places I've found that refuse AMEX are very small mom and pop operations. And of those, many don't accept cards of any type: cash only.
> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly
Oh yeah?
Please enlihhten me, how exactly can I switch providers from the Visa/Mastercard duopoly?
Like others said that choice is not really given in this case.
Also with the government option it wouldn’t mean that you can’t still use other methods - for example in brasil credit card or cash work just fine, PIX is just one (very convenient) option.
In the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take.
Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
Agree to disagree. Lock-in is a thing that companies design for.
You only have a potential choice until a company buys out all its competitors and surpresses the rest.
I've moved countries five times in my life. I still haven't been able to fully get rid of my dependency on Big Tech or the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
Brazil is on the West, fyi.
The new alignment isnt East vs West... But North vs Global South, which Brazil sees itself a part of the South.
Where's Russia and Australia then?
???
Wrong thread?
The comment I see reads like this:
"That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine."
on the West of what? Culturally and historically it's a Western country, yes, but politically and economically it's an Eastern country – founding member of BRICS and a developing economy. I think the author of the parent comment used "Western" term referring to ideological and economic grouping
I think the idea of what’s authoritarian sounding is more of a cultural/historical/ideological distinction, not something that would naturally map to an economic label like BRICS.
Also Western and Eastern are just labels in this context, not opposite directions, even if Brazil was “not Western” in some way, it wouldn’t make sense to call it Eastern.
West is just the US nowadays.
I would say West is Europe, Japan and a few others. But I think I need a new word for that one.
Ehh, I live in Europe. Moving forward I don't think it makes sense to bundle it with the US, who is like the biggest threat to the EU, considering the past few years.
Wero is run by the banks themselves, which are in turn controlled/restricted by the central bank. I don't think there's a meaningful difference on that front.
The European ECB isn't really in a position to directly offer services to people, and relying on every country's central banks to cooperate will take decades.
The central bank is governed by a direct mandate from the government (and, effectively, the entire population, when dealing with a democracy). Commercial and investment banks are beholden to their board and shareholders. There's a clear conflict of interest in trying to dump a service that should be available to everyone onto a business with narrower concerns.
The difference is clearly that banks have a different agenda from central banks.
SWIFT is a cooperative of banks also but it seems that some central banks endeavours are better. BTW Argentina created an innovation back in the early 2000s as a product of a crisis. It was implemented in record time and transfers were immediate back then and improving. It's not run by the central banks though.
PIX should be the gold standard for this - it’s works perfectly for all use cases that I can think of.
Hell even the homeless people around here take donations in PIX, but you can also buy a house with it. Zero fees involved
> Zero fees involved
Won’t someone think of the profits!
> PIX from Brazil is even better, to be honest.
You lack the inherent fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor protection that Visa/Mastercard provides.
Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.
That is by design. It separates the payment processor so it does just that, just payments. It is like money, once you give it to someone else there is no automatic way to fish it back from their pocket to yours. The correct avenue to deal with fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor is the small claims court (or civil court, or criminal court).
The moment you start burdening the payment processor with the roles of judge/referee over all goods and services you end up with the mess we have with CCs where Visa/Mastercard are morality czars that dictate what goods and services are valid or invalid, nuking people and companies out of modern society for their own arbitrary reasons.
Edit: And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.
> their own arbitrary reasons
Outside pressure behind much of it.
In any case, there's a fundamental mismatch between pressure groups and the leverage they can exert through single-consensus. I don't know how to describe the other consensus that is on my brain, but it is distinct.
That makes it a bad design, since every person you interact with has the potential to be a scumbag and not deliver on what you paid for. "Get a lawyer and sue them" or "Rely on your local consumer advocacy agency" cannot be the answers at the kind of scale that will be enabled.
This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards, and never use cash or debit cards (European in the US). I've personally had at least three disputes this year resolved in my favor by American Express, and will not sign up for something that suggests courts should do so instead.
At least up til now, this doesn't seem to be a significant problem with iDeal. Any iDeal receiver will need to have at least a Dutch bank account, which requires the bank to be very sure of the identity of the person/people (UBOs) holding the account. So downright fraud is unlikely. If there is, one can file a police report, and hopefully the DA will take it to court.
Disputes between non-fraudulent entities happen of course. But I really don't like some algorithm somewhere taking seemingly arbitrary decisions on that. It usually just amounts to robbing merchants of their money, and adding some exorbitant refund fee to top it of. Settling disputes is what small claims court and dispute committees are for.
Of course, with iDeal now effectively becoming EU-wide, things may get more difficult.
(I was editing when you repplied so I'll add it here for you:)
And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.
There also a large number of typos that happen. Typos in the amount. Typos in email or mobile number where you are sending the funds to (if pushing a payment instead of seller pulling).
Yes, but it's a statistically negative sum game for the customer. Visa wouldn't offer such a service if they weren't winning out in the long run, collecting rent on every one of your purchases.
That’s like telling people not to get homeowners insurance for the same reason
Like, yes, it’s technically a bad deal. But it’s still worth the extra cost for most people
> But it’s still worth the extra cost for most people.
Is it? You charge back over 2% of your transaction volume? If you don't then just removing the middleman will make everyone happier. If you do, I have questions as to why...
I am sure they gain something from it.
My Brazillian bank charges me 600% yearly interest on credit card purchases.
However, the cost of a lawsuit can quickly offset the costs of a CC. Depending on the state, there may not be a maximum cap on expenses, making lawsuits incredibly expensive. (Whereas having paid by card you could ask for a chargeback instead of needing to sue)
It's also a very time consuming ordeal having to sue vendors in these instances.
You're describing the concept of insurance.
It's not the visa/mastercard that offer chargeback, but the bank.
Thats a good argument but those are also features that could be provided by the force of government power in a government and country where the government is not and has not intentionally been corrupted, partially for the very purpose of preventing something like digital cash that is anonymous just like cash was before people foolishly gave in to the “convenience” of cards and acting like they had money by using credit cards.
This looks as a benefit on the surface, but it is not. In the end everybody loses -- the bank, the network, the customer, the merchant.
That has nothing to do with visa/MasterCard. (Well maybe it does in Brasil). In Poland if you use BLIK which is also a national payment network and you get scammed or money stolen from you the bank will also refund you, same as with visa or MasterCard.
Since last year, Colombia has implemented Bre-B, our copy of Brazil’s Pix, and it’s been fantastic. I can’t wait to see it mature to the same level as Pix, and I really hope both systems are eventually linked together.
> you can use it for recurrent payment, split payments, financing, cashout and almost all things a CC can do nowadays
But can credit cards really do all those things? You just entrust your credit card number to a party that does it for you, but the credit card system itself isn't taking care of those things like recurring payments.
Wero does have recurring payments planned too (apparently for end of 2026), seems like they're well aware of PIX and racing hard to get into exactly the same space.
Nah, BLIK from Poland was there earlier and is in many ways better, Wero was unfairly lobbied for by the old European guard, so most of Eastern Europe walked away.
They are now hesitantly joining Wero, supporting it only to downplay and to lobby ECB for an API platform and not for a product.
Tikkie has a different usecase. It's meant for smaller payments between individuals
In fact, you can pay a Tikkie using iDEAL/Wero
PIX is for everything, but Indeed Tikkie is more a p2p tool.
I think Colombian's Bre-B system took heavy inspiration on PIX. It is amazing and so easy to use.
(I haven't tried PIX so not sure) but UPI is really great too and I think that Pix is similar to UPI and UPI was launched by India nearly 4 years ago than brazil.
Anyways, one of the things that I am interested about in payment systems is say creating cross-payments between Pix,UPI and Wero.
UPI is already there for a few countries and there are more trials which are happening and my brother was a bit involved in trying to add UPI to london. (I think it was some efforts by his college perhaps, I am not sure completely.)
For India, the largest points are remittances and for other nations, it gives a really well built payment system and integrates it to more economies.
UPI is accepted in seven countries: Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
What about authentication?
I remember living in Belgium this was the case, and I always had to go and find that stupid physical barcode reader that I then had to hold against the screen, sign in with my debit card, PIN, enter the Euro amount, and then sign the transaction.
Now that I live in the USA, I have my credit card number in Bitwarden, with expiration date and CVC.
When I want to buy something, I let it autofill, and I don't have to verify and / or sign any transactions, bar high price ones (e.g. new $5k TV from Best Buy).
And in terms of security? It's a credit card. I review my statement every month. If I didn't make the purchase I call the fraud department and the charge is removed. Last time I did that they didn't even ask me questions.
I'd take Apple pay over the old(?) EU system.
One thing that surprises me a lot is that in order to use Wero with my ING account, I have to give access to my contacts, which I ultimately am not going to do. I wonder how the European payment system can be so ignorant of their customers' privacy.
> iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work
Is it? I see it more as an underwhelming fix for SEPA Direct Debit's inability to verify payment data synchronously.
* iDeal doesn't support basic features like pre-authorization. I'm not even sure if it supports setting up a payment agreement without triggering an immediate payment at all (pretty sure it didn't, when we integrated it a couple of years ago).
* It hands over the customer's IBAN, which isn't really that much safer than a credit card number, since any merchant can trigger a SEPA Direct Debit using it. While you can trigger a chargeback, that requires you to actively monitor for fraudulent transactions, which a decent system wouldn't allow in the first place.
* iDeal recurring payments are SEPA Direct Debit, with all their downsides, like taking days to confirm and a payment that fails due to insufficient funds in the customer's bank account resulting in a significant fee the merchant has to pay (and will probably pass on to the customer).
And Wero has one of the worst, least informative websites I have ever seen. So it's really hard to figure out how it works, and what it supports.
> It hands over the customer's IBAN, which isn't really that much safer than a credit card number, since any merchant can trigger a SEPA Direct Debit using it.
Yes. And they would quickly lose their ability to process any payments. This is the exact same idea as how credit cards work. I don't see my IBAN as a secret, all my friends have it, as thats how they can send me money right to my account.
> that requires you to actively monitor for fraudulent transactions, which a decent system wouldn't allow in the first place.
So that rules out credit cards too, exact same system.
I'm not familiar with pix mentioned in the other threads, but I am not familiar with any other system that is better
Interestingly in a number of African Countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania etc) , we have “Mobile Money”, Payments are instant, via USSD, no internet required, I can even pay online using USSD push.This is a classical example of humans using what they have to build what they need , no fancy internet enabled smart phones required. I can send money anytime instantly to my grandma deep in the village. She can withdraw from or top up her account in the numerous mobile money stalls that are everywhere. You pay school dues, medical bills , groceries via mobile money. I don’t remember the last time I visited a bank, hell I can even get an instant loan by just dailing *165# on my no internet feature phone.
That's still a man in the middle coordinating the payments (mpesa, etc...) and essentially holding both sides of the transaction. When you send money to somebody with mobile money you're sending it to the mobile network operator who then let's the other person know so they can move the money to somebody else (or cashout or leave it there).
It's not really a federated system because you can't for instance send money from mpesa in kenya to a different provider in uganda.
Actually you can send money (cross border payments ) to another country that also has mobile money, I can send money to a Kenyan, Tanzanian etc all I need is their Phone number. I am not sure what you mean by “holding both sides of the transaction “, when you send me money it appears in my balance (which I can check via a USSD query), it’s essentially a bank account but on USSD and sms. A lot of cross border payments are now settled via USSD. Hell I can now get a Visa/Mastercard by just dailing a code and I will have payment details with my name and address.
the mobile money while convenient r not exactly secure due to MITM.
Are you referring to m-pesa?
I'm just not sure this directly competes with MC/Visa the way the article suggests.
Didn't other EU countries already have something similar to iDEAL, as opposed to using credit cards? And now we're just consolidating them?
Also, isn't this just about online payments? Who's going to pay for a coffee with either Wero or a credit card? AFAIK most EU consumers use direct debit cards for in-store payments (those countries where cash is no longer popular), be it via Apple Pay / Google Pay or not. Many a card of which by the way is directly or indirectly powered by Visa or Mastercard.
At any rate, I don't see EuroPA or Wero break the 'hegemony' of Visa/MC the way this article claims.
There is a 3DSecure system for existing Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. After typing your card numbers, the transaction doesn’t immediately go through but you are also redirected to the bank’s system. Banks can ask you to use a hardware token, an app, or any other second factor to approve the transaction.
It’s a shame that this system isn’t ubiquitous for the rest of us not in EU.
> After typing your card numbers
Yes, but the whole point of Wero is that you don't have to type in a bunch of info that can be easily stolen. With Wero (and many other international solutions), you just scan a code with your phone, and your banking app handles the transactions. The existing legacy solutions are just duct tape on an existing system.
If 3DS and chip + PIN card usage were ubiquitous, the value of a stolen card number and even card would be zero, and this entire problem would go away.
Unfortunately, legacy deployments have just proven too pervasive to effect real change, even with substantial incentives, especially in early card adopting markets such as the US.
Aren't they ubiquitous and required at least for 5-10 years now?
The US essentially uses neither 3DS nor PINs.
But what's the value of stolen card data? It always requires 2FA to be used. It's just routing information to your bank.
Are there still cards that work without 2FA?
Does it mean that instead of depending on the Visa/Mastercard duopoly you now depend on the Google/Apple duopoly?
Of course not, since you can just install the Android app on your free software aftermarket OS. Surely banks wouldn't require hardware attestation or monitor your device for being rooted, would they? /s
Irony aside, yeah, this is a significant downside compared to hardware-based standards. Not so much for Android, as Google Pay and most competitors are implemented in software, but on a hypothetical iPhone or Garmin device running an open OS (don't laugh, it's a thought experiment), payment data security would be not much of a concern since all payment keys live in a secure and completely separate chip.
If this system is ubiquitous stealing your card number would be useless. Your card number becomes a user name like jonkoops that you would have no qualms sharing.
So you have to use a phone or does it work without one?
Does it handle credit card payments?
> you just scan a code with your phone,
And authorize yourself with the banking app, and, and...
It's not less complicated than auto filling credit/debit card details with your finger print on your phone or laptop.
For consumers, Wero, Pix, and similar systems only have down sides for online use. The most important down side is that you can't reclaim your funds if you've been the victim of fraud. Which you can when paying by card.
The problem with 3D Secure is that the merchant can unilaterally decide not to use it, which defeats the whole purpose of 3D Secure.
> the merchant can unilaterally decide not to use it
If they do so, they are telling the card issuer that they are happy to be on the hook for chargebacks/fraud. It's not an decision without consequences
Comparing to fraud 3DS reduces sales turn over by a lot, and this is the reason why for the most part it is not required in the US, too much friction during check out hurts business.
I tend to associate ignoring 3D Secure with Stripe. In the name of "less friction" of course.
non-3DS payments are trivial to chargeback, at least in the EU
They are everywhere. Default liability for online payments is and has always been with the merchant; only 3DS and some wallets can shift it to the issuer.
In America all payments are trivial to chargeback anyways.
We ought to have liability shifting. A long time ago there was a liability shift where if a merchant uses the magnetic stripe on a card equipped with a chip, then the merchant is unconditionally liable in case of a chargeback. We just needed merchants to be liable when the bank supported 3DSecure but the merchant chose not to use it.
The problem is that these are all US systems.
This is pretty much every payment I do in Finland works. Always have to go and verify it using my online banking credentials after I've entered the numbers. Does make me wonder why I need to bother with the whole number, expiry and CVV bullshit anyway.
I think any dutchie can vouch that iDeal has been amazing. I would also like to add that Wise has been amazing for american payments. I needed it for Anthropic at the time, and this worked good enough
Certainly better and easier to say than Chipknip!
Funnily enough, the ECB's Digital Euro initiative has a lot in common with the chipknip, except you can now also charge your wallet with larger amounts of money.
Chipknip has the mouth feel of Gnip Gnop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX2bqI--c-k
RIP chipknip. But let’s appreciate its ambition: electronic payments without being online.
Wero is super confusing. They're in the business of acquiring different methods (I don't even know if they always buy them outright or if they merge or they are just associated in some way), branding them ALL wero, and announcing that every payment in every channel will be rolled out SOON via wero, without ever offering specifics.
So in The Netherlands wero is the new name of eCommerce payments, but in another country the new name for peer2peer. But no idea when p2p will launch in the Netherlands or when eCommerce will launch elsewhere. And if the existing services will be degraded when they are internationalized or merged.
Banks and Visa/Mastercard probably love that you fill out your CC details on an online store, and next time you can just 1-click pay. Probably causes a big jump in revenue/profit. That's why they never innovated much.
Of course, it is incorrect, and digital payments everywhere (on a kiosk or online) should be intentional pushes, not pulls.
I want many payments to be pull-based (at least I'd go crazy having to positively sign off every utility bill and subscription), but the ideal user interface for pull payments shows who exactly is pulling what, with a few days notice, and a one-click way to cancel any standing authorization.
You could still have this 1-click experience with another system.
Like you could set some rule like “this vendor is approved for charges below $50”. We don’t need the legacy system for that.
(I don’t know if any payment systems can do that atm, just that if we wanted we could make them do that)
Visa seemed not to care too much about fraud though so at some level they do prefer ease of use over security
The redirect to a bank is worrying, isn’t it trivial to fake redirecting to a fake bank ?
You'll need to fake much more than just that. Usually the bank website will ask you to confirm the transaction by opening the banking app on your mobile phone.
Trading a dependency on MasterCard and Visa for one on Google and Apple is at best a sidegrade. More likely you end up worse off.
Not really, since in modern 3DS implementations, the redirect pretty much only shows a modal saying "check your phone for a notification and confirm this payment there".
Worst case, you'll be entering a one-time code received out of band, e.g. via SMS, and that message will mention what you are consenting to by entering it anywhere, so even MITM attacks are very hard.
The days of entering a static password in 3DS are long gone.
not really, the redirect itself is happening at EMV DS level, not by the merchant himself. Merchant has no idea what bank your card belongs to, so he does not know which bank to redirect you to.
there's the polish BLIK which is basically the same idea and there are probably a dozen more in other countries; need consolidation in this space tbh
> Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system.
That's basically Paypal and everyone still shits on them.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about the actual PayPal payments flow. Most complaints are around seizing large balances due to suspected fraud...
paypal goes to great lengths to not be regulated as a bank, right?
That’s how giro payments work. Same for Klarna.
Most online merchants redirect me to my bank's web page when I enter my Visa credit card number. In theory it should be possible to have a card number that by itself is useless and always requires an external confirmation?
with a mastercard from a swedish bank that is the experience that i get. all online transactions pop up a page from my back with qr code, this is authenticated through an app that shows me the transaction details and requires pin confirmation.
In Denmark i currently have to enter my card details but then, i get a popup where i have to enter my government issued ID username and scan a QR code from the related app (or enter from a 2fa token generator)
Its annoying - but it feels quite secure
I recommend also have a look at how eCommerce is done in Chile, e.g. Transbank (WebPay), FinToc and others. Chile passed some very good FinTech legislation a few years ago.
This is one of the reasons I opt for PayPal in the US when I have the choice. I've been in too many breaches. Direct to bank would be better, but I trust PayPal's security more than a random ecommerce website's security.
I caution PayPal would only work if you trusted the original shopping site, and perhaps your "credentials" got breached and used illicitly elsewhere. I got banned from PayPal after I tried to buy an electrical switch, was on an (apparently scam) website, never received the item, and opened a PayPal dispute. The scammer somehow convinced PayPal the item I tried to buy was illegal/against PayPal ToS, which resulted in them banning *me* instead of the scammer.
On the other hand, I see an unknown charge on my credit-card, dispute with my bank, and it's handled.
No way on PayPal,venmo, or any company associated with Paypal... I got screwed over with an unauthorized transaction on my credit card that was attached to a PayPal account... They refused to acknowledge the transaction as unauthorized... My Credit Card that was charged (Amex) on the otherhand, reversed the transaction within 24hours
In fact a unique payment ID (e.g QR) to "push" payment is even safer. No redirect. That's how payment should be. Not an authorization given to pull from us, but the agency for us to push the amount.
This is exactly what India's UPI (Unified Payments Interface) works. No PII, just a UPI ID is given and the user gets a push notification in Android/iOS app for approval (with PIN or security enclave like fingerprint).
In fact, there is EPC code, but it is rarely used and bank support is abysmal, at least in our country. But that can also be because we have some homegrown local standard for payment QR codes (and a new one in the works, lol).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
If I am understanding you correct, isn't this what UPI does already?
How does the website know which bank to redirect to?
A dropdown is offered and the choice is remembered.
Making a note of this as an obvious technical alliance that should have existed for decades.
as it was the case in Baltic states since forever. Payments with CC came much later.
> I shouldn't have to fill in any card numbers on the site of the merchant (which is unsafe). Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system.
To be honest with multiple banks in Germany, without Wero, works like that too..
iDeal is terrible for fraud. Consumers have to file a police report.
I'm annoyed by redirects that won't work if you set a different default browser or incognito mode as default for new tabs. Total BS.
Card numbers just work.
Also, payment "apps" that pack their own web engine and need 300-500 megs D/L, plus refuse to run on rooted / "unvetted" systems. No fucks given! Go away, give a browser and numbers.
If you don't set a default browser, you'll be prompted what browser to open redirects and such in every time.
Unfortunately you still can't easily distinguish between normal browsing and private browsing that way (though browsers could implement that in theory), but I ran that setup for a while back when Firefox couldn't integrate with the App Tabs or whatever it's called where Android apps have their own minimal UI around a full screen web view (which used to always be Chrome).
Card numbers don't work because the business receiving the payment doesn't automatically get a signal from the bank when payments come in without an annoyingly complicated banking integration, which is exactly what these new services intend to solve. They do work for the consumer in some cases, and I have been paying for some online services with regular old bank transfers in cases where I didn't need a payment to go through the same day. That doesn't mean it's an equivalent system in most cases.
If your banking app doesn't run on your device because of something as silly as root detection, you should find a better bank.
Perfect opportunity for browser or OS API to provide the feature, where we could make it more streamlined, secure, and consistent.
I like the friction to decide against frivolous spending...
> Wero is basically an EU-wide version of the Dutch iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work.
For some reason, most Dutch people are convinced that the way things work in the Netherlands is the gold standard of how things should work in general, and are very hostile to solutions from other countries even if those solutions are better by any sensible metric. This is especially painful when a less developed country does leaps around NL in some aspect, like:
1. In Poland, you don't need to carry any documents with you because if policeman stops you, he has access the police database anyway. This includes driving license.
2. Even if you really want to show a document, you can do it gasp on your phone screen with the official government app.
3. Albert Heijn, the most popular supermarket chain, started accepting Visa and MasterCard in 2023. Not in 2003, in fucking 2023.
4. The adoption of paczkomaty is pathetic and when you have a delivery the expectation is that you're supposed to sit and wait the entire day at home.
5. iDeal launched 2005. Przelewy24 launched in 2004. They function in exactly the same way.
> A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment.
Have you seen the new money app? It's on Tubu. It's on Weeno. I'm on Dippy but my friend is on Poob. Poob has it for you.
Frenchman here, living in Spain. This speaks to me on many levels. Bizum is so integrated in my daily life in Spain, that I wished my french friends had it when we need to transfer money between each other. Looks like we're going in that direction. Phenomenal
For the uninitiated: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you
also relevant is the end of this SNL sketch from this last weekend - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS97AzfKp3U
And this SNL sketch from a few decades ago:
https://youtu.be/NWIlScfHwOU?si=64xMCQf8MHtho44H
This one still makes me laugh!
> > A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment.
SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.
I doubt so, because i need to type god-knows-how-many characters by hand, while visually separating them into chunks by 4, then explicitly authorize the receiver. Oh, and explicitly authorise the country
> then explicitly authorize the receiver. Oh, and explicitly authorise the country
I've never had to do any of this, and I quire frequently send SEPA payments from Latvia.
While your complaint is valid, no need to separate in chunks, there's a checksum.
Yes, the only difference is that you need to communicate your bank account number and likely your legal name.
> you need to communicate your bank account number
in Latvia we need to do this for domestic payments anyway. We use IBAN even for domestic payments..
> and likely your legal name.
not mandatory. If provided, the bank tells you whether the recipient name matches the account, but if not, you can proceed with the payment anyway.
which... isn't really a problem for legal transfers, is it
Wero and Bizum are built on top of SEPA anyway
LOL thank you domain squatters. I can't think of any other reason why startups often always have the most ridiculous names.
A lot of these are puns/vague money sounding names in different languages.
Wero has got to be the worst of the bunch, though. An awkward combination of "we" and "euro" combined with "vero". At least the other pooq/wolo/snivum/rumio like names aren't trying to hard.
As terrible as these are, at least they aren't just random short English words.
It’s not just the domain squatters. They have to find a name they can get with Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc in addition to the domain.
I don't think it explains the "cat walks on keyboard" brand names for cheap Chinese goods on Amazon.
The gibberish brand names on Amazon are a formulaic way to streamline trademark registration which Amazon requires for some features on their selling platform.
https://stemerlaw.com/2025/07/16/why-are-amazon-brand-names-...
I wonder if a name with CJK characters can be trademarked?
Yes, they can. I suspect latin characters are used for practical reasons: compatibility with US expectations... some systems only accept latin characters and certainly your US customers wouldn't be able to search for chinese language characters.
Nothing more reliable than good old SPLARGLE kitchenware
I think they just use random generators to make a 5 digit string and ship it
Every single 3 and 4 letter .com domain has been registered for at least 20 years, not a single one is available to register. Domains aren’t the reason for names like “wiro” and “tubi”.
Yeah its a bit bad LLLL.com are all taken I do have k4qr.com but its LNLL.
On the other hand though, there are still .org and .net if you are lucky.
I usually just use tld-list.com to find all the domains from a particular keyword and then you can buy one which can be nice (eg: I bought https://mirror.forum this way)
that being said, you can find the registration prices to sometimes be cheap but the renewal prices can be double the .com or more (which is around 8-10$)
For my domain of https://use.expert its renewal is around 40-50$ (4x .com price) but probably worth it as I really love it but I might drop a few domains like mirror.forum as its 20$ just doesn't feel worth it to me and I will just auction it in some forums, not really that sure at the moment
So TLDR: you can find some good names if really need be but the idea generally for these startups is to do something similar to what I am saying and then buy the .com later if/when they have the funds, personally I am not that big of a fan of .com but I do realize that I have more chances of remembering .com's because that's the default expectation of the internet.
Sounds totally fine to me. I guess just like there are many Mastodon instances: mastodon.social, fosstodon, infosec.exchange, mas.to, etc., but one protocol by which they talk to each other.
I’m 50. All startup news looks like this:
“Payments via Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy launch new startup.”
It's better than that trend of taking English words and removing the final vowels before "r" or some other consonant.
I'm not actually sure Wubi and Tubu are better than something like Cashr tbh
Or adding "-ly" at the end.
"Just use Cashly!" "Download Crditly"
Obliteratr
Obltrtr
I can feel Galactus's pain.
ahahah!
so true. those names are silly. also, French and Spanish can already send money for free via IBAN / SEPA
That's not the point at all. Currently I'm using paypal to send money to friends when we split dinner or share other costs. I'd like to use a similar European service instead and not go through a ceremony to open my banking app, initiate transfer, write the recipient's IBAN, confirm and wait a day for the transfer to take place.
You shouldn't need to wait for a day, instant transfers have been a thing for a while now. Unless you're in terribly bad luck to be stuck with one of the few banks that are lagging behind.
International money transfers, even between currencies, now take seconds whenever I do them.
The "map phone number to bank account" services do make this whole thing a lot easier, but on the other hand I kind of don't want to help scammers by giving them the option to look up what bank they need to pretend to be before dialing a number.
Entering an IBAN once in a blue moon is a cheap price to pay to not be the US's bitch imho
I split bills via Revolut?
I could do it via IBAN and it would mostly (not to all banks) instant.
My bank also allows payments via a phone number now. Tested once and it works, but everyone's used to Revolut for bill splitting here in Romania.
Wero and Bizum mostly just associate phone numbers to IBANs and perform instant SEPA transfers underneath. The benefit is that you only need the other's phone number to send them money, usually already in your contact list, instead of them sharing you a twenty-something digit number.
Reminds me of PingIt.
https://www.retailbankerinternational.com/comment/barclays-r...
Ah yes, Pierre will surely have no issues paying for his baguette et croissant by filling in the boulangerie's IBAN on his mobile phone and waiting 15 minutes for them to check receipt.
We have instant bank transfers in Europe. And you can scan a QR code for payment via IBAN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
Love to see it.
When Canada legalized weed in 2018, the US administration made it clear that they can ban Canadians from the US for life if they have used marijuana in the past. The administration alluded to looking at Canadian's transaction history to facilitate cracking down on this more harshly[1].
It was so clear at that point to me how badly sovereign payments and banking is so needed. FATCA is a thing, I get it, I get the motivation- but allow another country to wield a "cooperation" like a weapon to attack Canada's sovereignty is just further evidence that we need to safeguard our data.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/4461315/will-your-cannabis-credit...
One silver lining of the current U.S. regime's behaviour is how it's forcing us to move out of the local minima of over-Americanization that we've been stuck in for too long.
As an American, I'm so glad America is finally crumbling from its position of power. Americans need a wake up call because our insane hubris and stubbornness is responsible for so much of the bad stuff in the world.
Another American here, I find these self loathing kind of posts to be so sophomoric and embarrassing
A European here, I find this kind of ignorance both hilarious and frightening.
If you come across a fellow citizen expressing dismay at the way your country has conducted itself, the appropriate response is a bit of introspection perhaps and some debate about why they might feel that way. Not more arrogance and outright denial.
Does the same sentiment apply to TN1 visas? Funny how you never see those burned in protest
That's my point, right?
We've had such a closely integrated economy and it's been a win-win for a very long time. Whether it's resources like lumber or manufacturing like Ontario/Michigan, or massive amounts of fuel refinement, we're so closely interconnected that we've needed that ease of cross-border travel for work. A consequence is that our industry hasn't evolved as much as it could have. We're sitting on an enormous amount of natural resources and technical competence that we've been feeding in to American companies forever, because we were reaping sufficient profits.
What the current regime could absolutely do is force us further from that local minima by throwing a tantrum over TN1 visas.
I work with a lot of Americans so I know they understand deeply: changing careers out of principle is a rare luxury very few can act on. Especially when you depend on your employer for healthcare (though we don't suffer that mistake as much). I wouldn't expect people to voluntarily quit their jobs the same way they are voluntarily stopping U.S. recreational travel in record numbers [1].
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cross-border-travel-down-dr...
Are you kinda alluding that if it was so bad in the US, people wouldn’t be asking for TN1 visas to go work there?
What makes you think EU will not look into it and block us from buying “bad things”?
Do you think that is a retort in some way?
EU residents have a say over the EU. Canadians have a say over the Canadian government. We do not have a say over a nuclear-armed idiocracy forcing it's profound corruption and stupidity on other sovereign entities.
For instance right now the US, in defending their war-crime boss Israel, has sanctioned judges of the ICC, including Canadians, Europeans, etc. Any US firm enforcing such a sanction should be booted from operating in all of those countries. Which is precisely why Visa and Mastercard are soon going to be a busted, provincial, US-only concern. Well, maybe they'll have it in the great nation of Venezuela as well.
Like American DUIs?
what until you understand what is next, cdbc and restricted digital money. Enjoy it.
I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you all that Wero is called Wero because Euro is pronounced "you-ro" and when you share your you-ro it becomes a we-ro.
Unless you're in Germany, when it's more like "oy-ro"... and Wero would be pronounced "ve-ro"... I don't think there's a German pun hiding here!
And when anything goes wrong, that's a ruh-ro.
What's wrong with good old uh-oh??
That's good too, my brain just likes the way Scooby-Doo says it.
Internet comment of the day awarded to CharlesW.
There's supposedly also an Italian pun based on "vero" in there.
I've heard pretty much every European English-as-a-second-language speaker pronounced the W differently, though, and pronunciation of the E isn't even consistent within native English populations. I can't wait for the "vee-ro? oh, you mean whay-ro" discussions between tourists and stores.
It will for sure be pronounced Véro in French :)
Ouiro does sound pretty ridiculous to be honest
> Euro is pronounced "you-ro"
This in not true for everywhere that uses the Euro, unsurprisingly because that encompasses a large linguistic area. I know for a fact France doesn't pronounce it that way.
Never realized this, mind blown :-)
Hmm Euro is actually pronounced roughly like yeuroh (like voyeur); not you-roh, and by the normal heuristics of English at least Wero would likely be pronounced more like weir-oh than wee-ro.
I guess it doesn't have to be perfect to make a funny name though.
When I give someone money I don't feel like I'm sharing it at all. Sounds like it goes from a "my-oh" to a "your-oh" and is aptly named from the jump.
(In French.)
That could be a massive hassle for American tourists, who will still mostly have Visa and Mastercard. I'm sure that there will be some kind of solution -- I suspect Google Pay and Apple Pay will support the new network. But I'll have to keep an eye out.
I might even have to start bringing cash. I used to make that the very first thing I did on landing. The last few times I didn't get any cash at all.
This is the EU equivalent of Zelle, but pushing into merchant payments and owned and run by the banks.
When the telcos tried to compete with the cloud providers by offering OpenStack they learned the business wasn't as simple as offering 10-15 services with some racks. I can imagine the same hidden complexity for payment rails
On the other hand regulations have taken too much power away from merchants and Wero could succeed with more merchant friendly terms. They are doing 3-legged payments so they are not subject to as many European regulations as Visa/Mastercard.
We already have SEPA payments in the EU. The path has been paved.
UK Open Banking is a counter example to this argument. It’s been a huge success. Transfers between accounts are seamless, and I never need to authorize Plaid to maintain a permanent session in a headless Chromium instance reading my bank account. The APIs are well-defined, universally supported, and include authorization scopes for viewing balance, authorizing transfers, etc.
That said, I don’t do many p2p payments in the UK (mostly because I’m an adult now, not splitting every bill like I was in college). And I wouldn’t like to add every one of my friends to my banking transfer history. The UK is missing something like Venmo with wide adoption. I assume the kids these days mostly use features like Apple Cash or Monzo transfers.
I have not heard about UK Open Banking rails for merchants being popular. You are talking about P2P? the article is about challenging Visa/Mastercard.
Payments are much more complicated than just who your issuer is. As noted in other comments, connecting the customer directly to the aquirer can lose significant functionality. Pre authorization, installments, card on file and other typical services may be offered differently than expected, or not at all. In addition, Mastercard and Visa still write the rules for industry. If at some point advanced Mastercard or Visa 3ds security significantly reduce fraud, and thus rates, consumers may start paying more for issuers that dont support similar technologies. On top of all of this, point of interaction device support may lag. The latest features from Ignenico and such may take a while to implement, or again may not be supported at all for smaller financial companies.
All that being said, it’s great for consumers to have the choice, and hopefully we all benefit from increased competition.
Disclaimer: I work for a Payment Gateway
The damage this admin has done to the USA as a whole, so far, is astounding. It's good for Europe to decouple from the USA, but I'm sure the folks at Visa and Mastercard aren't thrilled.
As interesting as this is, it kinda sucks that on Android this is supposed to be locked behind DroidGuard, meaning that you are effectively still stuck with the duopoly unless you are willing to run an unmodified phone or microG happens to be winning the game of whack-a-mole that day.
This is written from a French perspective as if southern countries joined later because they were not as developed. Quite the opposite. Spain, Italy and Portugal were in the first years of EPI, but they went there own ways because of the lack of progress that was being made by other members like France and Germany. Bizum in Spain is quite popular (I would say that more than Wero in France) and now is starting to manage payments in physical stores, after being a popular solution to transfer money between friends and in online payments (and in the physical black market).
You must be very poor at reading French because the article says the exact opposite, and that Spain, Portugal, Italy and Andorra served as test subjects since they already have this system called EuroPA.
Banks in Spain, Italy and Portugal are joining what this article describes as France’s Wero system [1]. («L'initiative française Wero».)
Focus this year is on P2P transfers. Commerce is targeted for 2027. Given EuroPA has done a token amount of transactions to date, I’m not sure anyone should hold their breaths.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
> Given EuroPA has done a token amount of transactions to date, I’m not sure anyone should hold their breaths.
The Spanish equivalent (Bizum) is merging into Wero is not a token use case, it's absolutely massive here. The absolute standard for peer-to-peer payments, more than 30 million users (>65% of the population), and they already launched contactless terminals for in-person commercial payments this month (https://euroweeklynews.com/2026/04/03/bizum-goes-contactless...).
Indeed Bizum is almost default now here in Spain, and for instance the equivalent in Sweden, Swish, is also almost default there. Went trekking into a national park, and the rangers will leave a number to Swish a bit of money if you want to use the fire pits; no other payment means.
I wouldn't say Swish is the default in Sweden because it doesn't support contactless payments. It is widely available though but many, many places only accept card/contactless payments. Of course, Swish is the default for person-to-person transfers, but not for payments.
Opposite is also true, some lower-value places (like fruitstands, street vendors) don't accept card/contactless because they don't want to pay visa mastercard fee.
I have no numbers but I would guess at least 50% of non-cash transactions are still card/contactless. I wouldn't be surprised if this number is 90%.
Wero is not French, but it has replaced France's Paylib. It's pretty awesome and seems to quickly have replaced all other apps (Lydia, PayPal) for small payments in my friend and family circles. I'm excited to see it expand to PoS payments.
From what I understand, Wero is identical to iDeal, which has been the standard Dutch internet payment system for decades. So I'm a bit surprised to see France claim ownership.
Wero is a initiative of a collection of banks from a handful of countries. Every country already had something like this, in some form of another, and now all these systems are getting merged into a common system.
No single country can claim ownership because it's an EU initiative. iDeal was one of the first and relatively easy systems across the EU, but it's hardly the predecessor.
Wero also does peer-to-peer transfers which iDeal doesn't (unless you use iDeal to pay for tikkies but that's still two apps). The new system is not just an iDeal rebranding.
> Wero also does peer-to-peer transfers which iDeal doesn't
Directly, without Tikkie? That's really interesting. I wasn't aware of that yet. My impression was indeed mostly a rebranding and expansion of iDeal.
Can you confirm people in france actually use wero? I had heard of it every so often but basically zero people actually use it, my revolut app has a feature to use wero but never used it. I mean would be great, getting rid of CC fees could literally lower grocery prices by 1-2%.
I use it for basically every payment with friends.
The greatest force of Wero is that, being from a bank consortium and not "another app", you can send money to people that don't even know the system exists as long as you have their phone number because the money will go straight to the bank account registered with this phone number.
You don't need to register to the service to receive money so basically anyone holding an account in a compatible bank can receive funds instantly. Which means, as the person sending the money, you don't have to tell your friends to install it.
I can only speak from my experience, but yes, multiple people (a few friends, people at work, and my uncle) have suggested to "make [me] a Wero" lately to pay me back small amounts. The fact that's it's integrated into the existing banking apps helps.
Every single friend to friend transfer around me is done via wero these days. And between business SEPA more and more.
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iDeal is an enormous success in the Netherlands so if banks implement it as well in other countries then it will definitely be competitive with credit cards for online payments
Wero is the pan-European successor to ideal. Other countries had something similar. We are now converging on using the same technique and mechanism everywhere. It also takes a bite out of payment providers like adyen because they managed the different payment methods for shops. In the future you only need to use Wero.
iDeal is in the process of being replaced by Wero, which is pretty cool!
Wero sounds weirdo, but iDeal sounds like a confession you sell drugs.
Ehm. Wero is partially based on the Dutch iDEAL system, which has been hugely successful.
Pretty much all purchases from Dutch webshops are paid through iDEAL as well as many P2P payments. It's also supported by international payment services (iirc Stripe and Shopify).
If they manage to replicate it in other European countries, Werk will be huge. Moreover, it's supported by many banks.
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)
Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/
I wish Wero was a real alternative but it seem to be a thin wrapper around Bank APIs and SEPA instant transactions. It has pretty much non of the functionality that PayPal or other services give. It just makes it easier to send money with a phone number instead of an IBAN. My bank doesn't even support it.
Isn't a wrapper making the ergonomics better valuable enough?
In Sweden we have Swish for domestic transfers, if I could use Swish (or if Wero took it over) the same way to transfer money to my friends living in other EU countries I'd be very, very happy.
What kind of functionality PayPal offers that is much better? Using cards instead of direct debit?
That’s what EMPSA[1] is trying to push. But Swish aren’t particularly interested in playing an active part.[2]
[1] https://empsa.org/
[2] https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/ekonomi/privatekonomi/1452366-d...
Vipps which is available in Sweden supports this system.
I know the Swedish government is also pressuring swish to integrate with vipps. So I guess you'll have this ability soon.
> non of the functionality that PayPal or other services give
What functionality are you looking for exactly?
I use paypal to transfer money to other accounts & pay for online shopping, possibly in other valuta. In my opinion Wero (earlier I used IDeal) is easier then paypal for this purpose
> What functionality are you looking for exactly?
* Buyer protection
* Obfuscation of my banking data (IBAN)
* Having access to it with my bank
* Not needing to share my contact list
At the moment I don't see much improvement over an instant SEPA transaction. Since both parties will see each other's IBAN anyways with Wero I can just give out my IBAN.
Isn't that much better than PayPal? Why would i want my money to end up in some intermediate PayPal account?
Isn't the whole point of existence of WERO that European banks got scared of digital Euro and started implementing something to get in the market first?
> My bank doesn't even support it.
It's not like it's that difficult to implement. Most Brazilian banks implemented a similar protocol in months.
What's the benefit of this over contactless payments?
It works over the internet.
How does it work when you need to pay for something in person? (what contactless is for)
That's what you use contactless for. Different systems have different purposes. Although people have also been known to use Tikkie or other payment request systems for in-person payments. Backed by iDeal, or now Wero.
In some countries there is a payment system that works by generating QR codes at checkout and scanning those with your phone. I don't know if Wero intends to also support those, but it could make for a direct integration into live checkout.
I think the Digital Euro initiative is closer to replacing contactless payments than Wero is, but it'll depend on the country I think.
iDeal supports scanning of QR codes, so I assume Wero does too.
IMHO, QR codes are a big step back from contactless and appeared in countries that didn't have widespread card adoption (e.g. China),
QR codes aren't a replacement for contactless. Contactless will stay, although unfortunately Dutch banks have recently discontinued their own contactless payment system and moved to Google Pay, which was a terrible decision.
You use your bank card or contact less payment from your bank app.
Optionally you scan or get send a payment request, and pay through Wero.
QR codes for now, unfortunately.
I'll be happy when we get credit cards without a visa or mastercard logo
What does this mean for travel if Visa is not “everywhere you want to be”?
I can’t tell if this is going to replace Visa/Mastercard or be offered in addition to Visa/Mastercard to handle transactions for locals while still allowing transactions to be viable for everyone else who might be passing through.
It means that businesses who accept cards will have a great advantage against businesses who think they are smart by making life difficult for customers.
> What does this mean for travel if Visa is not “everywhere you want to be”?
You'll live life as if you had AMEX instead.
I really want this initiative to succeed. MBway a participant in it, is perhaps one of the most useful apps I ever had on my phone. Extending its functionality to all of Europe would be outstanding. Especially if I can then use it online on international websites.
Totally misleading. Without reading all of it: MAYBE it means: it is/will be enabled for 130m people.
And even those of us who have activated it, have hardly used it for the most part, or hve concerns.
No, it's already 130M (out of the ~450M in the EU). Wero's predecessor (iDeal, Bizum, Paylib, Giropay) systems are already widely adapted in their countries of origin and will be fully compatible with it, and Wero itself has had a bit of time to pick up new users on its own by now.
The use is very high (daily) in my social circles these days. No more IBAN sharing. Non tech are on it. YMMV
It was weird to see them bragging about €6MM volume in the first year.
That number must be wrong? Swish volume during one month was €4759MM as comparison.
I can't imagine that 6 million number is the total volume.
Given that each participating country already had existing payment systems, perhaps that number is just international payments?
Pretty much was already available via SEPA. We had a similar system in the Netherlands called ideal which has now been subsumed by Wero to join an European alternative. In the end the idea is simple. All participating bank accounts have lorum/nostrum accounts for the pairs. Whenever the Wero transaction succeeds the money is wired internally directly. I’m not sure whether this mechanism will be replaced by SEPA direct debit entirely.
Too bad that, for Italy, BancomatPay joined instead of Satispay, an app that's actually used (especially in the North). Almost nobody uses BancomatPay.
Satispay is no longer really used anymore.
It was only welcomed by merchants in the 0-fee era, now no merchant cares anymore as Satispay is no longer free of charge and pulled the rug.
And to send payments across friends there's instant bank wires (often free of charge), and even when it's not instant it is executed in few hours-one working day max which isn't a big issue when you're transferring money across friends.
> And to send payments across friends there's instant bank wires
That's nice (when it's free), but banking apps are clunky, unfriendly, heavy and slow. Unicredit and Intesa, two main Italian banks, both have apps that are atrocious to use and riddled with annoyances.
People want an easy and quick way to send/receive money (Satispay does that almost well).
And for some banks Wero seems like it's going to be available through your existing bank app. Which is a no-go for me.
> That's nice (when it's free), but banking apps are clunky, unfriendly, heavy and slow.
They are all fine for a simple wire transfer.
I do have Intesa myself cause I've got mortgage through them and sending a wire transfer is both simple and fast.
So is on our other accounts: BBVA (Italian), mBank (Polish), Credem (Italian), Mediobanca (IT) and XTB and Revolut (both PL and IT).
I think you're really describing a 10 year old non-issue.
That's a pretty optimistic take. I'm a bit more cautious myself: The motivation is obviously higher than ever, but it's hardly a done deal.
There are still many obstacles ahead: Contactless payments (Apple does not provide any card emulation NFC access to the Apple Watch, for example, and only limited access to iPhones), chargeback handling, offline payments (a recent priority of the EU under the larger umbrella of digital resiliency), and of course the network effect of the existing millions of terminals, ATMs, and cards in the field.
But does this act like a debit account?
What I like about a credit card are things like you are buying on credit, not using money in your account directly. So in the case of fraud or issue a chargeback it's been much easier to get credit card transactions reverted rather than get money put back into my debit account.
Also I like credit cards for the rewards, cash back or especially travel points. But also things like extended warranty coverage and other perks.
> But does this act like a debit account?
Yeah, it's a debit account. I'm in Spain and use Bizum frequently. It's just a "pay from your bank account" system.
You mostly type in your phone number, get a notification (or text, depends on the bank) and open up your banking app and approve the transaction.
You can send money person to person as well.
Many European countries have a similar system. Wero is "just" stitching the national systems together into a EU wide one.
Credit cards with rewards and points are pretty rare in Europe, and if they do exist, pale in comparison to what you can get in the US/Canada. It depends on how you look at it, but it's kinda good. The EU caps credit card transaction fees at 0.3% and debit transactions at 0.2% iirc, versus in the US/Canada where they are frequently 2-3%. In theory this cost is just passed onto the consumer, so paying an extra 2-3% to get 2-3% back in points or whatever.
> Also I like credit cards for the rewards, cash back or especially travel points. But also things like extended warranty coverage and other perks.
Much of this is funded by inflated interchange fees paid by merchants (and thus inflating the cost of goods for everyone). Ideally you would just pay for the added value you see (fraud protection, charge disputes, supplemental insurance) rather than those costs being externalized to other buyers.
Wero uses your existing debit account, it's not a separate account.
I'm legitimately curious how these American payment companies held onto their worldwide dominance for so long. I'm used to seeing the sign at restaurants of all the other cards they accept, but for so long I've only ever seen Amex, Discover, Visa, and Mastercard in folks' hands.
There is a huge first movers advantage on infrastructure.
Additionally until recently most political parties and people in the EU didn't see this as national security related infrastructure. That's why it was allowed to be privatized and handled by external companies. There is a lot more critical digital infrastructure that is being moved away from. Think Microsoft office suite, operating systems, cloud systems and more.
Bank deals, especially in Europe where debit cards is more popular than credit the issuing banks preferred deals largely dictate what network you'll be on.
Its simple: they have deals with all the big banks who issue the popular cards with all of the rewards, so those are the cards people get.
geopolitics, dollar, and then network effect. in that order.
What bearing does the dollar have on any of this exactly?
What do you mean? How it cannot? In Europe's context, 60's and 70's, was a collection of fractured dozens of small countries each with its own currency. US had a single currency which was also world's reserve currency so every major bank on this planet already had to build technical and legal pipelines to handle global trade. On top of that you had US omnipresence in post WW2 Europe and world for that matter. American payment networks were the fastest and obvious place to build payment networks across all those borders which was then also a footing ground into intra-market payments. As I said - geopolitics, dollar, network effect in that order. Can't have one without the other.
Banks can settle with Visa and Mastercard in their currency of choice, so I don't see why the dollar matters for any of that.
And regarding Visa and Mastercard being US payment networks: This is now undoubtedly the case, but for much of their history, their EU subsidiaries were actually independent cooperatives owned by large European network member banks. They only sold their respective stakes to the US parent organizations in the late 90s, back when European banks, in a pretty severe blunder, considered cards a thing of the past of no importance for the future.
Amex is not very popular in Europe. Discover... I am not sure, not that much.
Visa and MasterCard are everywhere though
Really depends on the country. Discover acceptance is actually relatively good globally, as they have interconnections to Diners Club, JCB and China UnionPay.
Equivalent PIX is very popular in Brazil for instant payments.
So this is basically the EU version of Zelle? Basically a way to transfer money between parties who already have established trust. Am I understanding that correctly?
But I am confused about how this relates to Visa and Mastercard. Those systems are used for payments between parties that have not necessarily established trust.
> So this is basically the EU version of Zelle?
Yes, but more importantly, it's essentially the EU version of Alipay (which can be used for merchant payments as well as P2P transactions).
P2P payments, specifically SEPA Instant bank transfers, have already been instant and free for several years now in the EU, so there's no need for a Zelle alternative (other than maybe for contact discovery without IBAN).
And speaking of Alipay: This is the actual global alternative to Visa and Mastercard that almost nobody in the west is talking about or even aware of. While it used to be mainly used by either inbound or outbound tourists in/from China, it now spans many countries and issuing and merchant banks all over the world, including many in Europe. Wero is many years behind in that regard.
Yes Wero and Zelle are similar: real-time payment systems, where money is sent directly from bank account to bank account, and recipients are looked up with a convenient ID (a phone number, or an email).
It's a an all-in-one kind of system where you have p2p payments and traditional online payments (like what you would do when making payment for a product on some e-commerce shop).
Plus some additional features like payments through QR.
I wonder if at some point we’ll be start taking about non-smartphone sovereign payments. The main reason I still use card is to be able to use it without a phone, and the technology of debit cards (around Europe at least) is quite OK. Maybe Europe should have a parallel payment track that is just a new card brand.
Wero rides on SEPA SCT Inst, already mandatory EU-wide. P2P will land fast; merchant displacement is hard because card interchange funds the chargeback layer SEPA doesn't replicate.
The title is definitely an over-exaggeration. "Goodbye" will happen when Europeans going abroad no longer need to take Visa or Mastercard cards with them.
What is currently happening is the solving of instant cross-border P2P transfers, which sounds like a very niche problem. Online payments are mostly a solved problem because payment gateways like Adyen or Stripe already support local payment systems.
When we need that, we can use Apple/Android pay in many many places or just spin up a temporary visa/mastercard with platforms like Revolut.
Spoiler: Europeans use whatever their banks provide.
That's the thing, European banks provide Wero, or a system that integrates with Wero. Or Swish, but integration between the two is inevitable in the future.
This whole "new" ecosystem is just gluing together existing national digital payment solutions so it can be used internationally.
It's already on my bank app since a couple of week, but I haven't tried it yet.
Maybe the original source that the current article links to is a better link: https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/bancomat-bizum-epi-sibs...
I'm pretty sure American gov won't react kindly
Who cares at this point. Nothing has ever managed to unite Europeans as effectively as the orange man’s unrelenting torrent of temper tantrums over the past year and a half.
Americans, we know some of you aren’t crazy. Can’t wait for the grown-ups to be in charge again, but in the mean time we’ll be moving on.
Here's the thing: the grown-ups are in charge now. It's just that all spoiled, bratty children are too entitled to notice. It's like a scene from a movie where a serious teacher gets assigned to a class of misfits - no matter what the teacher does right, they'll always be "wrong".
> Who cares at this point. Nothing has ever managed to unite Europeans as effectively as the orange man’s unrelenting torrent of temper tantrums over the past year and a half.
> Americans, we know some of you aren’t crazy. Can’t wait for the grown-ups to be in charge again, but in the mean time we’ll be moving on.
Assuming by "grown-ups" you mean Team Blue, then you'll be disappointed, because they manufactured consent for "orange man" every step of the way. People are too easily fooled by the good cop / bad cop routine, which is why it's continuously deployed.
We have a uniparty with red and blue facades whose illusion apparently even pervades overseas. Buckle in for disappointment no matter where you live. As if your country doesn't have similar power struggles.
It's capital interests against everybody else. Always has been. "Lesser of two evils" is still evil.
OK Doomer.
Does that thought-terminating cliche still work on people?
This is just more trite "Muh both sides" doomerism.
No it isn't.
It's safe to assume you've either drunk the kool-aid or have something to gain monetarily (even if falsely assumed) by allowing the illusion to persist. Either way, you're literally part of the problem, as is anyone else who still takes this system seriously.
Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. Trump and Obama are the same.
Nobody said same. In fact, on a surface level, they're easy to view as polar opposites. One must critically examine beneath the surface to see how they're both on the same team (capital).
What about sanders, mamdani, aoc? Or are they just fringe candidates and don’t count? For every AOC there are a dozen Schumers I guess. But I disagree with your thesis because there are factions of ethical capitalists in the democratic party that have never existed in the modern Republican Party.
As a former Sanders supporter, it became clear that even though Bernie was likely acting in good faith, the establishment used all of their levers politically and in capital-controlled media to limit him to the role of controlled opposition. Emphasis on "controlled."
> ethical capitalists
That is not a coherent concept, especially in late stage capitalism.
America: You need to be more self sufficient and not lean on us so much!
Europe: <launches European payment initiative>
America: NOT LIKE THAT!!!
Just to add a little bit more context, European interbanking initiatives are older than Trump insanity. What we are seeing at play is a slow decades-old strategy finally bearing fruits. Though Trump is for sure a factor pushing for adoption.
I'm pretty sure European governments know that and are prepared to deal with the temper tantrum.
Which country in Europe is prepared to deal with anything? They can’t even break away from the country currently invading them
Europe is dealing with the US, just not via empty threats on social media. Things take time when you have a functioning democratic system with checks and balances.
A bit rich on an article showing we are precisely breaking away, topic by topic, to something which is more balanced.
I wouldn't be so sure, at least not this administration. Fragmented monetary systems provide more opportunities for creative accountants and that's something the people running everything in the US seem to benefit from.
This action is a response to the tariff regime imposed by the US. The current administration decided that it was going to use its role as the leader of the global hegemon to threaten and coerce other countries, and actions like this are a result. The American government can threaten them all they want, problem is that they've been threatening everyone since Day 1.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284950 - March 2025
> “How can I decouple from the US as fast as possible?” is what this leads to.
> Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock. The US will apply pressure for short term gain against allies while they move away long term.
Just for context, it looks very much the same as Fast Payment System in Russia. Been a thing for some 10 years, and huge amount of retail works on it.
How does it compare to the digital euro, isn't it better?
Is there an english version of this?
Dumb question for those EU folks ...
How do you use this when paying online?
Is there the equivalent of an "Apple Pay" button on merchant website for those based in EU?
(Or a Pix button, when in Brazil, etc?)
A "Pay with PIX" button is just a QR code. You reach the payment page, the merchant website generates a QR code, you open up your bank app, scan the QR code, confirm the merchant and the purchase, then the merchant website runs a spinner for like 10 seconds while it confirms it in the background and you get a confirmation.
The merchant typically uses stripe or adyen or whatever (mollie has a cute name!), a payment service provider or PSP.
The PSP looks at what methods the merchant wants to accept, which methods the user could potentially be using (based on e.g. country by geo IP or some delivery location) and show the relevant icons.
EU users will see schemes like wero or Przelewy24, Japanese customers will see 'konbini' among the icons, and US users may only see credit cards, Apple Pay and Affirm. There are TONS of payment services. Stripe lists 123 of them.
The merchant will want to exclude methods that have high costs (for themselves), maybe they also care about their customers not getting into debt (so no buy-now-pay-later or credit), and some payment methods have higher rates of disputes/chargebacks (e.g. Amex).
In general, most merchants will want to offer as many methods as possible to prevent consumers who have a preference (this week) for using account A over account B from bouncing.
Yes at the pay page there's a 'pay by X' list of options, you choose it.
You then typically have two choices: scan QR with your phone or login to your bank.
I normally open my bank app on my phone which signs in via my face (iPhone), I then press the scan button (first screen), point at my phone at the screen to read the QR code, the transaction pops up on my phone, I press confirm and again it signs via my face. Then you're done.
If you were shopping on the phone it's even simpler of course as the pay button opens up the transaction in your bank app right away, but typically I shop on my laptop after research.
I've had this for almost 20 years by the way in the Netherlands, but now it's pivoted to the EU standard.
Go to store, select "pay by Wero". Get redirected to payment screen where I select my bank. My bank just shows a QR code that I scan with my bank app, authenticate the usual way, redirect back to store, job done.
In Portugal there's often a "MB Way" payment option - which AFAICT is the PT version of these other systems.
Do Visa/Mastercard make much money in Europe? Most people use debit cards. I’m admittedly not clear on how exchange fees work for those.
Debit cards have scheme fees and interchange rates just like credit cards. Interchange rates for credit and debit cards in the EU are actually very comparable and both very low, which is very different from many other parts of the world (e.g. in the US, debit interchange is effectively a flat fee per transaction).
Visa and Mastercard make money on scheme fees paid to them by both issuers and acquirers (i.e. indirectly merchants), not interchange.
There's an indirect impact of lower interchange rates, as issuers will usually not be willing to pay more than 100% of what they're earning in interchange in scheme fees. Acquirers have no such implicit limit, though.
They make buttloads. Debit cards still require a cut for VISA/MasterCard.
How does it compare to digital euro plan?
Source was posted back in February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861789
Tant mieux pour eux.
I suppose some added sovereignty is to be expected when your closest ally extorts, threatens annexation and slams you with tariffs.
Too bad cryptocurrency never took off. Such a missed opportunity
Can't be a missed opportunity if it never took off.
People know what they like/dislike, and crypto payments didn't cut it for whatever reasons. UX, cost, and waiting for blockchain confirmations come to mind.
Cryptocurrency didn't actually solve the problems we have, while introducing problems we didn't need to solve, because almost all of them copied Bitcoin. The only problems it solved well was for grifter politicians and criminals skirting financial regulations.
Note this transfer mechanism requires trust in your banking provider, is not pseudo-anonymous, is not decentralised, uses the banking system we already have and doesn't require a whole new 'currency' in order to transfer money.
Good! Now please remove dependency of alphabet + apple for bank apps, and we're golden.
As political instability has shown, it is a bad idea to have all your payments go through a single, weaponizable, failure point in New York.
Europe needs to be functionally as independent as possible.
It’s kind of wild seeing American soft power evaporate like this. I didn’t think it was the kind of thing that would happen in my lifetime.
If they can make it as seamless as UPI, that would be incredible. UPI, imo, is the pinnacle of ease of internet payments - as seamless and quick as it can get.
Yes, every user just gets a handle with no personal or bank info revealed and off you go. User keys in a UPI ID in any merchant site/app, get a push notification for approval in mobile app. Can associate multiple bank accounts to a UPI ID underneath. Approval will ask which account to debit from too. Can't get simpler than this.
UPI would be even better if it were easier for tourists to onboard and use it while traveling in India. The general mindset seems to be that there's enough domestic tourism that making things easy for foreigners isn't that important. I think that really hurts the country's economy.
My comment was more centered around the UX of UPI. But to address your point, there is a separate app for tourists called UPI One World, works as a digital wallet and the UX is similar.
If only it were that simple! UPI One World isn't an app, it's a system that apps can implement, and the implementations, like Mony and Cheq, all have high fees and require you to go to random offices in inconvenient locations to verify your identity in person.
As far as I can tell, all of this is "OK" because the primary target market for UPI One World is NRIs - again, who needs foreign tourists?
Canada chiming in, Interac rules above anything else.
Interac should join this scheme outright or at least become interoperable with it. I'd love to be able to pay for everything on my trips to Europe without using US credit card networks.
I am a European (Czech Republic) and I have never heard of any of those (Epis/Bizum/Vipps).
They are generally country specific. But the underlying systems are made for interoperability. You might have an app with a different name in your country
Soon: "President Trump issued a new tariff today on all non-US payment systems, saying `We have the best protectionist economy in the world, it's really great`"
Please post in English. Chrome is unable to translate this page.
If it requires (or will require) Google/Apple authentication then it's of course not sovereign payment. It looks like Wero works on GrapheneOS, at least for now. Will that always be possible?
Will it always be smartphone only, or will there be other options?
I've read about the problems kids (eg, 10 year olds) are having in the countries which have gone mostly cash-free when they don't have a smartphone or debit card to use for otherwise normal and age-appropriate transactions.
I can't help but think that by switching even more of the economy to smartphone-based solutions then kids will have even more restricted purchasing autonomy.
To say nothing of people like me who don't have and don't want to have a smart phone.
once again the crypto shills - r left exposed.
pix as already proven in Brazil - is faster. this system again will be faster & secure & more convenient with less fees.
When I click on a link, I expect information.
When I get blasted with this: https://i.imgur.com/oeGU3qd.png
I really don't know what to do. I can't read so much. Bounce.
Crypto broskis have been selling so many bullshit coins for this specific moment in time and failed.
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"sovereign" :D :D :D
In the EUSSR1
I thought crypto would have solved this ;-)
To be fair, crypto is anti-consumer.
I tried Wero just now. Crashes at once on my phone.
I run Lineage is, want backups on my own NAS. I have a feeling that if I want this European payment app I need to accept backing up my data on an American cloud.
(I've nothing against Google really. But I want my backups at home.)