From what I've gathered, they've decided to make this completely unusable without a Google- or Apple-approved smartphone. Horrible! Are individual banks even allowed to make that an option for clients? Though even if they are, I doubt any will.
I would LOVE a PayPal alternative, but this is just not it.
Every once in a while, I check it out, and every time I am confused or disappointed.
Don't we already have SEPA transfers? What benefits would this add? Why are they completely unable to pitch it to someone who's curious and receptive to the idea?
Since the other guy wasn't particularly helpful, i'll try to add some context (mostly through my knowledge of iDeal, the Dutch payment system which Wero is based on).
You're right that it's a bit confusing, as Wero's marketing is mostly focused on P2P transfer usecases, ie like US's Venmo/Cashapp, which as you note we can already do with SEPA transfers.
Wero does have a small benefit in that case, as it's slightly more secure (you don't need to share your bank account, and there's a dedicated app that most Western Europeans will soon be familiar with).
The bigger benefit I think is as a unified e-commerce solution. While Wero is not directly an EU initiative, it's still supported by the EU commission. In general a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating EU financial/economic news is that one of the main things the EU tries to do is strengthen and protect their "single market": they want to make the flow of commerce within EUs borders as seamless as possible.
Having a unified ecommerce payment solution, so that you can eg just as easily order goods from German webshops as a Frenchman as you can from a French one (barring shipping etc) is in the EUs interest. Of course it's also in the banks that put forward this initiative's interest.
But, speaking as a consumer: this rules! iDeal is really nice, much nicer to use than credit cards or PayPal imo. I think it's easy to see why you would prefer a dedicated payment system in ecommerce rather than plain SEPA transfers (which most shops don't support) or credit cards, but in case that's not clear:
- Faster checkouts
- Don't need to share bank account numbers/sensitive credit card info
- Fees are much lower than credit cards (at least for iDeal its fractions of a cent per transaction: https://ideal.nl/en/ideal-fees)
That was super helpful, thanks! Germany is just starting to accept credit cards. I hope that this enables digital payments for small transactions where cash is still king.
I hope it works well for visitors and recent immigrants. It can be surprisingly hard to open a bank account in your first few months in Germany, and I hope it won't leave people out of that new infrastructure.
I think it's important to note—which isn't mentioned on their website at all, stupidly enough—that wero has two parts. The p2p payment, that you can see in the parent article. And the e-commerce functionality, which is based on the dutch iDeal. See https://sowieso.wero-wallet.eu/nl-en/
Kinda odd that their marketing does nothing to clarify this...
Can anyone explain me exactly why it is a suitable alternative to VISA and Mastercard (and why people were waiting for it). I am trying to understand the full picture here, so multiple things come to my mind.
First, SEPA instant payments already exist and are really instant up to a certain amount, and I am guessing that Wero builds on top of that a sort of identity layer, to sidestep the whole IBAN thing. But it is likely more than a SEPA alias, since it was supposedly hard to set-up.
Second, VISA and Mastercard are worldwide payment networks (or rather, they each operate payment networks with various names?). But I am failing to grasp what's hard to reproduce here too. I heard that in Europe there were only a few national alternatives, like Carte Bancaire or Girocard, but why? Is it just because banks can't agree on the design of an alternate network? But all the fees associated with using VISA or Mastercard should be a big enough incentive to push something else. (basically what's a payment network?)
And lastly, why are all the new (free) digital banks (néobanques as we call them here) relying on either Mastercard or VISA and never on Carte Bancaire for example, while it generally offers lower processing fees (and that they can be cobranded).
I think I am missing a lot of context, and I asked LLMs a while ago about these but themselves don't really explain what is the infrastructure needed to operate such a network.
would be cool if they'd also only be using Europe tools for hosting but so far I've seen Atlassian Statuspage, Zendesk, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Matomo Cloud (which uses AWS), Digital Ocean and Google Ads.
The problems with Wero is that it needs a linked phone number and nobody can answer what happens if you link two bank accounts from different banks to the same phone number (is this even supported? Why do I NEED to link my phone number?). Also, every bank needs to manually support Wero and when you want to pay online you need to scan a QR code with your phone (yes even on your desktop) and approve it inside your banking app which makes it way slower than just using PayPal or Google/Apple Pay. It's astounding how EU bureaucrats came up with "PayPal but worse" over 25 years after PayPal was founded.
> The cooperation builds on the success of existing solutions, connecting them via a central hub to create a truly pan-European experience for cross-border payments.
> European consumers will continue using their current preferred solution, now with broader European reach
> The cooperation is based on a central interoperability hub, operated by a future central entity jointly established by the partners.
So it is unlikely that Wero will be the single solution for entire Europe. Instead it is one of many solutions that hopefully will interoperate in the future. But we are still in the MoU phase only, so lets see what happens...
It’s not like this issue had been solved like… what… 15 freaking years ago in China.
The fact that this is shown as a « big step forward » is a a great example of how much the EU is lagging behind. It’s honestly quite sad.
Anyway, let’s wait and see, I already used Wero, it works OK, I don’t really get what the difference is between this and instant bank transfers but again, let’s wait and see.
It disgusts me that there's no consumer protection law against 'if you want to use our service you must have an Android or iPhone'. Blue Bikes (rental bicycles) also have this problem and there it's possibly even worse because they used to have a card.
As an EU Citizen I do not want to switch from a proprietary fintech to another, I want FREEDOM. So, I have nothing against FLOSS cryptos, but I see exactly no reason to choose a company instead of another, especially given the record of EU illegal size of funds for anyone the EU Commission dislike, not differently than USA or Canada.
I would pay for a solution that aggregates these alternative payment systems that aren't tied to VISA and Mastercard and their rules.
Wero, RuPay, WeChat Pay / AliPay, Crypto (through 3p like coinbase or directly), etc.
And handles them in nice and unified API, with hooks for subscriptions, etc. (taking into account that some payment methods do not support recurring payments, so there should be some hook to send an email to the customer to renew manually, etc.)
31 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadhttps://werotracker.eu/
Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958399 - February 2026 (1020 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963089 (Wero subthread)
I would LOVE a PayPal alternative, but this is just not it.
--
From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...:
> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.
https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/37991694065...
I hope we'll get there soon.
Don't we already have SEPA transfers? What benefits would this add? Why are they completely unable to pitch it to someone who's curious and receptive to the idea?
You're right that it's a bit confusing, as Wero's marketing is mostly focused on P2P transfer usecases, ie like US's Venmo/Cashapp, which as you note we can already do with SEPA transfers. Wero does have a small benefit in that case, as it's slightly more secure (you don't need to share your bank account, and there's a dedicated app that most Western Europeans will soon be familiar with).
The bigger benefit I think is as a unified e-commerce solution. While Wero is not directly an EU initiative, it's still supported by the EU commission. In general a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating EU financial/economic news is that one of the main things the EU tries to do is strengthen and protect their "single market": they want to make the flow of commerce within EUs borders as seamless as possible.
Having a unified ecommerce payment solution, so that you can eg just as easily order goods from German webshops as a Frenchman as you can from a French one (barring shipping etc) is in the EUs interest. Of course it's also in the banks that put forward this initiative's interest.
But, speaking as a consumer: this rules! iDeal is really nice, much nicer to use than credit cards or PayPal imo. I think it's easy to see why you would prefer a dedicated payment system in ecommerce rather than plain SEPA transfers (which most shops don't support) or credit cards, but in case that's not clear:
- Faster checkouts
- Don't need to share bank account numbers/sensitive credit card info
- Fees are much lower than credit cards (at least for iDeal its fractions of a cent per transaction: https://ideal.nl/en/ideal-fees)
- (Coming) built in support for subscriptions
Hope that gave a bit of an idea!
I hope it works well for visitors and recent immigrants. It can be surprisingly hard to open a bank account in your first few months in Germany, and I hope it won't leave people out of that new infrastructure.
Let's see how it goes!
Kinda odd that their marketing does nothing to clarify this...
First, SEPA instant payments already exist and are really instant up to a certain amount, and I am guessing that Wero builds on top of that a sort of identity layer, to sidestep the whole IBAN thing. But it is likely more than a SEPA alias, since it was supposedly hard to set-up.
Second, VISA and Mastercard are worldwide payment networks (or rather, they each operate payment networks with various names?). But I am failing to grasp what's hard to reproduce here too. I heard that in Europe there were only a few national alternatives, like Carte Bancaire or Girocard, but why? Is it just because banks can't agree on the design of an alternate network? But all the fees associated with using VISA or Mastercard should be a big enough incentive to push something else. (basically what's a payment network?)
And lastly, why are all the new (free) digital banks (néobanques as we call them here) relying on either Mastercard or VISA and never on Carte Bancaire for example, while it generally offers lower processing fees (and that they can be cobranded).
I think I am missing a lot of context, and I asked LLMs a while ago about these but themselves don't really explain what is the infrastructure needed to operate such a network.
I wonder if there will be interoperability between them, that would be pretty sweet
Basically it's a swish/ideal etc equivalent for the entire EU.
Especially these parts:
> The cooperation builds on the success of existing solutions, connecting them via a central hub to create a truly pan-European experience for cross-border payments.
> European consumers will continue using their current preferred solution, now with broader European reach
> The cooperation is based on a central interoperability hub, operated by a future central entity jointly established by the partners.
So it is unlikely that Wero will be the single solution for entire Europe. Instead it is one of many solutions that hopefully will interoperate in the future. But we are still in the MoU phase only, so lets see what happens...
The fact that this is shown as a « big step forward » is a a great example of how much the EU is lagging behind. It’s honestly quite sad.
Anyway, let’s wait and see, I already used Wero, it works OK, I don’t really get what the difference is between this and instant bank transfers but again, let’s wait and see.
KYC, proprietary, part of a broader strategy of having Europeans rely more on banks and digital id: https://epicompany.eu/
I'll pass.
Wero, RuPay, WeChat Pay / AliPay, Crypto (through 3p like coinbase or directly), etc.
And handles them in nice and unified API, with hooks for subscriptions, etc. (taking into account that some payment methods do not support recurring payments, so there should be some hook to send an email to the customer to renew manually, etc.)