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.
> 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.
That sounds worse to be honest. You're essentially asking for the government to be not only aware of but also able to control all digital payments. That upends how money has worked over (literally) millenia, and is an incredible risk to take. Giving someone in government the ability to block someone's payments and trusting they won't abuse it might be fine as long as good people remain in power, but do you really want to bet the entire nation's ability to live life on that?
Furthermore, wouldn't determining if a payment is legal require prying into details of the transaction that may violate your privacy? And if they make an incorrect determination based on stuff that really wasn't their business in the first place, they now have the force of government behind them, going far beyond merely declining the transaction.
I would think what you should want to advocate for is a system that cannot block payments (at least domestically) just like with cash, and enforcement either happens prior to enrollment, or after the fact through some other traditional law enforcement mechanism (warrants, etc.).
Not intending to defend either system but private financial institutions basically end up deputized as enforcement arms of anti money laundering and sanctions in the US and probably other countries where the payments systems are privatized. That's a why every bank has a big compliance department - the laws say a lot about who and what they can serve and they have to be on top of it.
Which yes means sometimes legit transactions that match rules meant to catch money laundering and other shady business get blocked or flagged. Sometimes out of avoidance of legal risk, rather than actual certainly anything illegal is happening.
I don't know if the centralized government implementation would be any better in that regard, but at least you could complain to the government instead of having a bank hide behind a law they didn't write but have to enforce.
Credit cards, iDeal, SWIFT, Paypal, Venmo, etc are all fully traceable. Anonimity at the protocol level is not a design goal for any of these.
Being worse is debatable: the main difference is the government being able to execute blocking on their own, vs having to convince all banking institutions to do it for them - doesn't sound hard as the govt will always have all the leverage.
Also important to note that BCB (the central bank in Brazil) is autonomous, and technically protected from political influence, thought that ground has been proven shaky.
In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry. In EU. When 2 countries from you, there is a FCKIN' war happening.
Only because France, Germany, UK and similar countries are against guns and against self-defense, where your only option is to lay on the ground and let the attacker kill you.
Luckily we can still use guns for self-defense, we can conceal carry by default and we will fight EU laws till our death for this.
(pepper sprays, knives and even katana, whatever. Heh that's a joke, but for real, you can use that without any permit, in theory.)
EU Brusel is trying very hard to force these idiotic laws to every country.
Eg.: they forced limited mags for rifles.
We have bypassed that with local law haha, when you get a gun permit (which is not easy, but not impossible) you just fill a paper with "a gun buy order" for the police and you are by law allowed to have unlimited magazine, silencer and special JHP ammo. Reason self-defense and defense of your property (default reason, police will only check same thing they've checked for gun permit. Your criminal record).
And also luckily we don't need to use anything, because our criminality is a liiiiitle bit lower than France, Germany and UK.
You know why.
But tide is changing, Poland will be biggest economy in EU in few years and their gun laws are also changing and we have a lot of common with them.
I believe together with other reasonable countries (Slovakia, Hungary etc.) We will overturn this idiocy comming from France, Germany and other "west" countries.
Btw I'm for EU, even for federalization of EU. But with US approach. EU should be no.1 country, yes country, in the world.
> In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry.
I don't think that's how its supposed to work. So IF you're correct and a French entity of any kind is found breaking current Czech laws, THEN this must be reported and action must be taken against it, no matter the law, no discussions here.
> Only because France, Germany, UK and similar countries are against guns and against self-defense, where your only option is to lay on the ground and let the attacker kill you.
This is a big reduction to the absurd, and unnecessarily inflammatory. I'm no dang, but I would ask you to please refrain from such things, in the name of civil discourse. It could have been dishonestly framed in a number of other ways, for example, "Poland as a country is pro-violence and pro-crime, since they are arguably fond of shooting people". I know this must not be as simple, as "laying on the ground and letting the attacker kill you" does not look like a sound defense strategy. However, gun collecting and sports are not, to me, good reasons for owning firearms. To each their own.
> Luckily we can still use guns for self-defense, we can conceal carry by default and we will fight EU laws till our death for this.
> (pepper sprays, knives and even katana, whatever)
Wow, go Brussels I guess. Hope they can eventually implement the "idiotic laws" that make people unable to kill each other with katanas.
>In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry. In EU. When 2 countries from you, there is a FCKIN' war happening.
That shouldn't be happening. French banks on Czech soil should operate under Czech, not French laws. Otherwise the Czech banking authorities should go after them. Something is fishy about that.
Also, which banks do French citizens working in the arms industry use if they're not allowed to? This is all very bizarre.
> Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Goodbye.
Wow this sucks. One thing I took from this comment (and the previous one), if you allow me to (badly) synthesize is: we might need less policy making and more policy enforcement.
>Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Ridiculous.
I'm sure what they did was illegal, the problem with such cases is that even if you take them to court and win, you'll still lose a lot of time, money and stress in the process of fighting a bank in court, while for the bank the lawsuit is just another small business expense.
Centrain industries and businesses tend to act above the law even if they know they're in the wrong simply because the punishments if they get caught are too lax.
That's why I'm a big fan of direct personal accountability. Like the person working at the bank who made the choice to close the accounts should go to jail. Because otherwise nefarious people simply hide behind the accountability shield of a large org where nobody is responsible for anything and accountability is always deflected.
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.
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.
I have been using iDeal for many years now and have yet to see any of the downsides of it being a product of a commercial bank.
Perhaps it's a difference in banking culture between different countries; I would certainly not put the same trust and faith in a Wero alternative set up by American banks, that's for sure.
Banks are beholden to policy from the central bank and financial authorities. Payment fees are capped, payment processing terms aren't a free-for all, and the power of individual banks is kept in check. The people doe have a voice in all of this, just not in the direct implementation process.
You cannot do a chargeback on iDeal, but I don't think that is related to it being a product of commercial banks.
The American companies Mastercard and Visa are subject to American rule of law. In the case of a criminal or authoritarian president, such is an issue. You can see how Russian assets got frozen and SWIFT stopped working for Russia after they did the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Should the USA invade Greenland, they could stop bank payments done via Mastercard or Visa networks.
So for sovereignty, we are better off without USA. We should also transfer our gold and other assets out of USA, since the country is moving towards fascism.
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.
Wait until you see that ECB is shared between European states central banks that themselves shared between each country commercial banks
The ECB is directly governed by European Union law. Its capital stock, worth €11 billion, is owned by all 27 central banks of the EU member states as shareholders.[6] The initial capital allocation key was determined in 1998 on the basis of the states' population and GDP, but the capital key has been readjusted since.[6] Shares in the ECB are not transferable and cannot be used as collateral.
--
Italian Central bank
As of early 2024, the 15 largest shareholders represented slightly over half of the bank's equity, namely UniCredit (5.0 percent), Cassa nazionale di previdenza ed assistenza per gli ingegneri ed architetti liberi professionisti [it] (4.9 percent), Fondazione ENPAM [it] (4.9 percent), Cassa nazionale di previdenza e assistenza forense [it] (4.9 percent), Intesa Sanpaolo (4.9 percent), Cassa nazionale di previdenza e assistenza dei dottori commercialisti [it] (3.7 percent), BPER Banca (3.3 percent), ICCREA Banca (3.1 percent), Generali Italia (3.0 percent), the National Institute for Social Security (3.0 percent), Istituto nazionale per l'assicurazione contro gli infortuni sul lavoro (3.0 percent), Cassa di Sovvenzioni e Risparmio fra il Personale della Banca d'Italia [it] (3.0 percent), Cassa di Risparmio di Asti (3.0 percent), Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (2.8 percent), and Crédit Agricole Italia (2.8 percent). The remaining 49 percent were dispersed among 157 shareholders, mainly banks and banking foundations.[49]
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.
It's a joke but Visa and Mastercard are American corporations so Americans can feel relatively secure using them. If you live in another developed country, relying on the whims of American entities feels less secure than something subject to the laws of your own country.
Americans are pretty aware that government by large, multinational, unaccountable corporations sucks and has basically all of the downsides of big government without any of the accountability upsides.
American media may be less likely to share that narrative with you. But the actual people figured this out a while ago and they're mad.
I'm American, and I wasn't offended. Because it's true, we actually can't comprehend this because we are the poster child of government via huge corporations. We literally don't know what it's like to have a functioning and trustworthy government handling these things, it's completely foreign to us.
I strongly disagree. Substitute with 'the Chinese mind can't comprehend' or 'the Palestinian mind can't comprehend' or 'the Muslim mind can't comprehend' or 'the African American mind can't comprehend' or 'the immigrant mind can't comprehend'. Obviously that would be a slur and not an acceptable way to phrase a point.
HN rightly didn't allow these type of generalization comments against Russians after it invaded Ukraine. HN rightly doesn't allow these types of generalization comments at Palestinians. It's wild to me the different standard applied lately to similar comments towards Americans. Definitely a discourse erosion/strain going on on this site when it comes to certain topics/nationalities/generalization of peoples and stereotyping/labeling.
In the link I gave dang set the rule that these sort of comments applied towards a nationality aren't acceptable here and an instance of dang actively stepping in to enforce it.
America was literally founded on this premise, and it should come as no surprise that our government has (d)evolved into what the founders felt was inevitable.
America is fairly exceptional in that it's not racist to say "Americans are ____" given it's a melting pot of so many different races and cultures. That's a beautiful thing, but something that the white supremecists in control of the US are working to erode.
Edit: damn I think this account is actually a bot. It's only pro Israel talking points, islamaphobia, and appeals to the mod to get people banned.
dangs rule is about nationality, not ethnicity. "You can't post nationalistic slurs to HN" Wanting consistent enforcement of standards is not wrong on my part. HN routinely attempts such with HN posters routinely calling out when comments are not in line with HN standards. Am I misunderstanding community enforcement on HN?
India is made up of an incredible mix of ethnic peoples. Yet saying 'the Indian mind can't comprehend' would be considered a slur.
Your thinly veiled attempt to align me with white supremacists is EXTREMELY out of line.
As is calling me a bot out of line. Ad hominems that I am a bot because I push back on topics HN SPECIFICALLY chose to make an exception for (look at my comments prior to that since you are digging through looking for character assisnations) is unreasonable on your part. Either discussion is open on the topic, or it should not be allowed. Not some weird space when only one sides perspective on the topic is tolerated and having challenging views makes one a bot. Again during discussion on Russia's invasion, it was not allowed to call people defending Russia/Russians bots. There seems to be erosion/strain of standards here since then.
Nothing I have said is islamaphobic. One can challenge ideas/religions. Bringing up their history/failings is not phobic but is needed to push for productive/healthy change.
As was recently pointed out to me, you might want to look to PGs thoughts on discussion and adjust how you respond to thoughts you disagree with.
https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I will admit I'm old so I don't have a lot relevant to ad to a lot of current tech discussions here but I will try to add more.
Trust Switzerland? Protonmail is literally fleeing Switzerland. You now have to upload Government ID to use any online service with more than 5k users!! They are also now requiring backdoors (Article 50a). Literally the end of privacy!
It's honestly depressing no one talks about this, or even knows about this.
The government? Either the national government or the EU get legitimacy by being democratic instructions. That doesn't mean they get blind faith, it is healthy to scrutinize their actions.
US corporations on the other hand get only my contempt and scorn.
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.
Lets see. Gerhard Schroeder, fled to RU. Nicolas Sarkozy, convicted. Silvio Berlusconi, convicted. Geert Wilders, convicted. Slobodan Milošević, convicted. Jean-Marie Le Pen, convicted. Marine Le Pen, convicted.
Donald Trump, convicted (pardoned everyone who attempted a coup on Jan 6 2021).
Victor Orban, surely he'll get convicted.
Benjamin N., Vladimir P.: wanted by ICC.
(This excludes cases like Jan Maršálek / Wirecard fraud / GRU spy. Also, have a peak at all the cleaning Zelenski's government had to do, including in his inner circle.)
Seems we in Europe at least are attempting to uphold the rule of law. I can't say the same for US corporations or US government, given the current administration. That being said... can we stop voting for these narcissistic criminals? Thank you in advance.
> 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.
This reminds me of how all the drug dealers use USPS because it actually requires a warrant to open the package.
If the government has to enforce banking KYC/AML itself they won't be able to hide behind all the third party fuck-fuck games and they'll get sued into oblivion. I'm sure they'll play the normal federal court and sovereign fuck-fuck games but it would be glorious trying to watch them try to enforce the BSA and Patriot act bullshit while not being able to hide behind the auspice it's just a private bank collecting the data.
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!).
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"?
I've found it funny how many people still believe that most places in the US don't take Discover. I almost exclusively use my Discover card and the number of times I've had it declined is a tiny fraction of a percent. Most people also don't seem to realize that Discover is also a bank, so you can use it for both credit and checking/savings. So yeah, you likely don't have to be forced to use the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. The only time I've recently used one of my Visa cards was when I visited Europe where I found much more places don't accept Discover, although there were still many that did.
Hopefully the acquisition of Discover by Capital One results in lower processing fees so the network broadens globally and makes the notion that Discover isn't viable a thing of the past.
Why is this downvoted? While slightly sarcastic, you make a good point.
Is it possible to get a UnionPay (China) or JCB (Japan) credit card issued by a European bank? That would be very interesting. I assume in the last 10 years, there is way more acceptance of UnionPay in Europe. UnionPay is widely accepted all over East and South East Asia these days because there are so many Chinese tourists.
Costco doesn't even accept Mastercard (credit cards), so they're kind of a unique case here where they intentionally choose to only accept one particular type of credit cards.
Theres a natural tension here, because in order for this to be true you need a diverse market with many competitors. But that is bad usually, because it's extremely inefficient, so it gets optimized out. The monopolies we see are indeed an optimization - the natural climax of a developing market.
Consider payments: you do not want to carry around 100 different cards and trinkets just to pay for things in your daily life, right? And for merchants, they do not want to make deals with 100 different companies to accept payments, right? So what's the end result?
We see the monopolies in the US economy because our economy is very efficient. It could be even more efficient - consider, for example, how much time and money could be saved if only one phone OS existed.
But then of course that's bad for you, the consumer, because then these huge corporations rule your life and can essentially do whatever they want.
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.
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.
Do corner stores (small informal convenience stores) in Brasil usually accept PIX? I assume they all cash-only.
Also: What is PIX uptake/penetration like in the countryside? China is shocking how fast that countryside wet/farmer's markets started accepting AliPay. Literally, you can buy a kilo of pumpkin (namguo) using nothing but your mobile phone with AliPay, and the old lady running the stand (in a wet market) probably has a 6th grade education. (No hate on that!)
> Do corner stores (small informal convenience stores) in Brasil usually accept PIX? I assume they all cash-only.
Pretty much every single one I've always been to. From the smallest one-person street corner popup shop to the biggest shopping mall boutique and outlets, virtually everyone accepts PIX payments. Its just better - its one of those "you gotta use it to understand" things.
Anecdotally: I've even gave some cash to homeless people on occasion using PIX. This may seem weird, but in Brazil, you must have a bank account to be able to subscribe to any sort of government benefits, and since its free, pretty much everyone has an account and therefore can receive PIX payments. Its also safer, since you're not carrying cash with you, and even if you're somehow forced to transfer, there are ways to monitor and reverse transactions (so called MED).
Of course, there's been a few incidents over the years where some concerned citizens would not accept PIX payments because "the government will know what you're spending on" (in contrast to, say, credit card operators, where apparently the "right people" would know what you're spending on...).
There are some criticisms of the current system, which is fair, but most that I have heard are ideological in nature or some sort of foreign defaultism.
In Africa they've had this since ~2005 with the Mpesa system. It basically transfers cellphone credits as payment. In certain regions everyone with a dumb phone was hooked up and you could do anything from buy a coconut from a guy on the side of the road to pay your taxi driver to pay at the supermarket.
Wow, this is a great reply! "In Africa" -> Can you share a few countries? Google tells me that East Africa is the biggest users: Kenya, Tanzania, etc. (No hate on the use of "In Africa here"... as Google tells me it is used in at least 10 different African countries.)
Replying here to throwaway2037 because I can't reply directly to him, but yes, even most informal businesses accept PIX, including some random guy selling candy or bottled water at a stop signal.
The only exception I have found to consistently refuse PIX are some parking lots, and they refuse credit cards as well, accepting only cash, probably to hide their earnings.
Yeah the concept of "Western" is a relic of the Cold war, just like Western Europe / Eastern Europe ( past some countries being genuinely there )
It's still taught like that to younger people, but definitely shouldn't.
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.
On the West of every single country in Europe, to start with.
Don't take this the wrong way, but have you looked at a world map? I ask since a significant chunk of people from the US cannot find Mexico on a map ...
Aside from its very evident geographic location, Brazil was the site of the first lasting European colony in the Americas established by Portugal.
People in Brazil speak Portuguese[1], a Romance language derived from Latin and closely related to Spanish, French and Italian.
The genetic lineages most commonly found within the Brazilian population include Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and to a much lesser degree but still significant, Lebanese and Turkish [2].
The top countries whose citizens visit Brazil as tourists are overwhelmingly from the Americas and Europe: Argentina, the USA, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy and the UK.
Likewise, when Brazilians travel abroad, their main destinations are Argentina, the USA, Chile, Portugal, France, Italy, Uruguay, the Caribbean, Spain and the UK.
Share of exports to Asia: ~41%
Share of exports to the Americas and Europe combined: ~47%
Share of imports from Asia: ~43%
Share of imports from the Americas and Europe combined: ~50%
How could one reach the conclussion that Brazil is an "Eastern" country? Oh yeah, they joined a trade organization with China and Russia ... sure, they must be Eastern now.
I agree that Brazil is Western, because it obviously is; it's a former European colony that speaks a European language and has European religious and cultural values. But geography has nothing to do with the concept of "Westernness", beyond historical etymology. Australia and New Zealand are as much part of "the West" as Canada is.
> I ask since a significant chunk of people from the US cannot find Mexico on a map ...
I love these comments. Don't worry: A "significant chunk of people" from Europe also cannot find Mexico on a map. Really, these comments say nothing. They are like "man on the street with a microphone" gotchas. Anybody under 30 years old has a mobile phone with Internet: They open their maps app, and search for Mexico. Done: Borders the southwestern United States.
The West is UK, Western Europe, Australia, Canada, US, Scandinavia. I agree that Japan is a really interesting one that shares a lot with the West, but doesn't have the same cultural roots. I wouldn't be opposed if they wanted to be counted as part of the West, but I don't know if they would.
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.
That was said exactly when that guy first came years ago. I'll bet my money ( via Wero or not ) the whole movement will be shattered by an " European-friendly " governement.
Perhaps private companies will still retain a bad sentiment, who knows, everything else will be business as usual.
Zero fees for an individual, by regulation. Companies pay for PIX usage. Some banks waive these fees, and it is comparable to debit card transaction fees.
And magically things are much cheaper when you do this, both because they're actually cheaper without individual billing and associated overhead, and because the few larger payers have a powerful incentive to ensure they pay as little as possible.
For day-to-day payments, GNU Taler seems like the best option by far, since it protects the customers’ anonymity. (It’s essentially like digital cash.) Unfortunately, only very few banks support it at the moment.
This is a brilliant response. I love personal anecdotes like this that meaningfully contribute to a better conversation on HN.
First: PIX sounds insanely good! I wish I had it where I live.
My follow-up question: Can anyone with experience with India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) comment about capabilities compared to PIX? It is frequently lauded as one of the best e/mobile payment services in the (developing) world.
Judging from what I am reading about PIX capabilities, UPI can do everything. It can also allow you to make merchant payments from Rupay credit cards. It also supports automatic recurring payments.
> 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.
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.
Then use a service that offers escrow. I don't need my groceries to use insurance for the eventuality that the store goes belly-up in the 2 days until I can check that the products arrived in good order
Base payment products should just do payment at operating margins rivaling a non-profit. It's public infrastructure
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.
(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.
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.
> This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards
Which illustrates one of the most prolific examples of regulatory capture.
Credit cards became mainstream because of that protection, which was a triumph for the payment processors. Whatever they spent on lobbying was a bargain.
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).
> Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.
Visa/Mastercard aren't handling chargebacks, the banks are. With PIX the way to get a chargeback is the same: if you've been victim of fraud you open a claim with the bank, they'll review it, then possibly give you a charge back within a week. This review process might take longer or be denied, which requires a lawsuit.
But it's only less risky for banks to chargeback immediately on Visa/Mastercard because they make so much money from credit card fees that they can afford it.
False. There are mechanisms to undo PIX transactions. One such mechanism is the MED (official tool by the Central Bank). It can be used to help victims of scams, fraud and operating failures on the part of institutions so they can recover the cash).
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.
Insurance like that is normally because if the potential size of the loss. Losing a house is way more than most people could stand. A closer example might be buying the extra service contract on every electronics purchase you make: that's usually a bad deal.
> 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...
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.
I can't imagine in what world it sounds like a good idea to attach an extra insurance product as a mandatory step to use cash online. Feel free to take out insurance for every 5€ product you buy online but I don't want to pay an extra % of my income to the finance industry just to use the money I've earned
Brazil has a huge advantage in that they've required full transaction-level transparency for tax authorities -- with clearly defined technical requirements -- for almost 20 years now. One can argue whether it's a pro or a con to share this level of detail with the federal government, but it certainly makes taxation easier and fraud prosecution simpler, too.
Visa/Mastercard provides that because the US is a very untrustworthy country. I don't know the situation in Brazil, but here in Europe small claims court just works fine. I think it's pretty dysfunctional to have to rely on private companies for adequate legal protection.
It works (passably) well here as well. However there's widespread lack of basic civic awareness which makes it harder for people to even know they could be settling such things on small claims court.
> Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.
This is no longer the case outside US. Last time I had the account of one of the few credit cards I'm using (on the Visa or Mastercard networks), for transactions I should have been clearly reimbursed / credited, as it used to be the case, actually awarded in my favor, was four years ago. Recent transactions, with proven vendor at fault, ended up with my loss. All over Europe (Im traveling a lot). So no tears shed for Visa or Mastercard losing the EU turf.
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.
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.
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.
I've used BLIK once, for an online payment from the Netherlands to Poland, and for that it was terrible. I assume it's much better integrated into the Polish system.
iDeal can also be used for recurring payment. I set one up yesterday.
If you like Tikkie, you may like bunq as well.
This is kind of a problem with Wero though [1]:
> The Wero app can be installed on any mobile device or tablet running iOS 16 or later, or Android version 9 or later. We recommend updating your device to the latest version of its operating system for maximum performance, convenience and security.
> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.
Why the ** am I constricted to using an app on Android or iOS. Ever heard of laptops? Windows? ChromeOS? macOS? Linux in general?
banks really like hardware attestation and putting that in laptops and PCs causes serious pushback from people like us here. not an option to not have hardware attestation on mobile - it's been there since day 1, there's nothing to protest against anymore
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.
It's in theory already possible with iDeal from what I can tell (I've seen companies that use subscriptions set up an initial iDeal payment and then convert it into a regular recurring SEPA Direct Debit), but I'm going to assume that the process is kind of messy since I haven't seen many companies implement the system in that way.
Direct Debit is very nice, largely because your bank manages the subscription; companies have to declare the payment ahead of time and if you get balance mixed up for some reason, then the bank will just do the payment whenever your balance is correct if it happens within a week. I've had credit cards decline on subscriptions before because I didn't have enough loaded up on them. Never had that issue with SEPA.
Either that or "credit cards just work", so very few entities bothered until now.
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.
(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).
> 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
> 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.
this is not true. the IBAN alone is insufficient to authorize a direct debit.
No. The bank gives you a prominent notification when someone new gets a direct debit authorization for your account. And a merchant gets banned quickly when they misuse their debit authorization.
I was under the impression that direct debit requires an initial authorization from the account owner? Otherwise anyone with your bank account number can pull your account funds and bank account numbers are hardly a private information (unlike a cc where you need the card number/expiry/cvv code and generally a correct address)
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.
Yesterday I was renewing my vehicle registration through my US states website. They offered a range of payment options using embedded options on the site. The direct bank account option had the lowest fee but when I tried it I was immediately scared of the security. They used a 3rd party bank account transfer provider that asked me what bank I used and looked like it was going to prompt me for my login info before it errored out and I moved on.
Why can't the US have sane banking standards instead of this mess where you have to agree to a new 3rd party TOS and EULA for every purchase you want to make.
US should have sane transfers soon. The Federal Reserve developed FedNow which is instant bank transfers. It is more secure than ACH since it only does pushes and requests.
It takes time for banks to implement it. There is also conflict with Zelle that some banks developed. I don't think it is meant for buying things, but secure and fast replacement for ACH would be good enough.
What you see is a glued or patchwork to make the things work somehow with the existing state of things. Strictly speaking, a lot of banks do not offer API support and yet these third party tools are able to orchestrate a flow with is nothing less than man-in-the-middle-attack.
The change if it happens at all, across the board to streamline can only from from government mandate. The industry is always going to go for finding some low cost option to achieve the target. The private players are always going to optimize for short term gains.
When using a government website, you were intimidated by the security posture of... Plaid? (Genuine question, maybe this was some other provider but Plaid's aggregator tool is the most common place I see this pop up in real life for ACH)
I personally have _no idea_ what the security posture of plaid is. I know they're a startup and made a bit of noise a few years ago, but if I was trying to buy something and a third party app popped up saying, "hey give me total access to withdraw directly from your bank account for a sec", why on earth would I say yes to that?
It also seems to go against common security advice. "Never log into your back account if redirected by a website you sort of, but don't really trust, except sometimes its alright and it's up to you to tell the difference" is a terrible way to secure banking.
Nowadays Plaid uses OAuth for many banks, but the real problem is and always has been that they get full access to your transaction data and pass it on to their users.
If any site asks me for my bank login credentials, I run far away and start checking if I've made any security mistakes. So far Paypal is the only credentials I'll enter after a redirect.
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
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.
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.
I can only speak for my countries, but almost all payment terminals now have the option to scan a QR code with your mobile banking app to pay using Wero.
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.
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.
The QR code just contains a URL to a website, so you can also just use that link and a web browser. That website will let you choose which bank you use, and then redirect to your bank's website which will use your bank account directly. I don't think it works with cards at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eugh. The problem with that is that people don't verify they've actually been sent to their bank. An attacker will set up fake merchant sites, pay for Google ads to get your traffic, then have you log into your bank to pay for things.
The more we normalise this, the quicker people will fall for it.
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.
This is actually how it works in India with "e-mandates".
In order to set up a recurring bill the merchant must get a "mandate" from the customer, which involves them approving the amount/frequency/term of the payment. The customer can at any time view a list of open mandates on their bank's web site/app and cancel any they wish. Recurring payments only succeed when the mandate remains valid.
The payment amount may be revised downward without getting a new mandate, but raising it up requires replacing the old mandate with a new one.
In order to make a non-initial charge the merchant must pre-authorize it with the bank a few days prior (handing the ID of mandate under which the charge is made to the bank), and pass the confirmation they get back from the bank when they do the real charge. The bank notifies the customer about the upcoming renewal and its amount.
That still works. There are three entities: customer, bank and merchant.
The merchant should never be able to pull from your bank account. However, the merchant can send an invoice for a payment. Either the customer manually pushes the payment, or delegates to the bank that each invoice from merchant X should immediately result in a payment push [1].
The difference from the pull system is that the customer can at any point end this automatic push payment, but in the pull system the customer can only beg the merchant (eg. the gym) to stop charging their account.
[1] Or even better in an ideal world, delegate this pushing to their local finance app. So the bank can't put roadblocks for a customer cancelling a subscription.
> [...] the merchant can send an invoice for a payment. Either the customer manually pushes the payment, or delegates to the bank that each invoice from merchant X should immediately result in a payment push [1].
This already very close to how SEPA direct debits currently operate. I can instruct my bank with one click to stop honoring a given direct debit mandate (they'll then block all further payments under the same mandate reference), request any payment to be reversed for any reason (that I don't have to provide) etc.
The only difference to your suggested model is that the default is to honor all new mandates. I believe nothing – operationally or from a scheme perspective – prevents banks from requiring positive confirmation for every new mandate or even every single direct debit, though, and some banks (but not mine) even support this.
> in the pull system the customer can only beg the merchant (eg. the gym) to stop charging their account.
My central problem is that in current pull based systems (both CC and direct debit), the merchant has access to the information to take money from my account. But that information can leak and someone else can take money from my account.
It's insane that digital systems are less secure than cash based system. If a merchant hands me a paper invoice, they can't just take cash out of my wallet.
The merchant should communicate to me where I need to deposit money, and I should put that into my system. The merchant should have little to no information about me.
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.
That's really not how it works. You as the user are prompted to pick the bank you want to use, and then your bank prompts you to approve the transaction.
The only scenario I can think of that might involve google or apple is if you want to use Android or iPhone for mobile payments with NFC.
Which part of "confirm the transaction by opening the banking app on your mobile phone." does not depend on a banking app installed on a Google/Apple-controlled environment?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
The physical barcode reader is long gone in Belgium. Instead, you scan the QR code with your banking app (or on mobile, click a link to open the banking app), and either verify directly for amounts under €250 (?), or verify big amounts with ItsMe, another app, using Face ID.
> 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.
I can't talk about Belgium but from what I've read, the dutch iDeal system requires nothing of the sort. It seems to act as a broker between your bank and the business, and a user's input is limited to pick the bank you use and approve the payment through your bank's app.
It used to be the case in the Netherlands with iDeal that you'd use your bank's e.dentifier for two factor auth (a physical device that you'd put your card into to get a code you could then put into the website to verify) - they replaced this with using your banking app sometime over the past 10 years.
Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system.
That is really cool. I would like to see that system in the US given that my bank has IP restrictions for my account. I would also like the ability to pre-approve specific vendors for specific amounts within each bank as a native service all banks should support.
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)
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.
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...
Providing credit cards online even by phone for 20 years I have never had any issues, or known anyone who had issues. The few occasions my cards were compromised (all my own fault): a restaurant in Vienna pre Covid when cash was king in Europe, I insisted to use the card and the waiter took it inside lol. Got a 4000k cruise booked a few weeks later. Another time at an ATM in Brazil, I even noticed the suspects around the machines waiting and still went for it. A gas station ATM in NYC. That’s about it. Every time I called the bank and they refunded the money. So what I’m saying is security doesn’t seen to be a big issue in the US when it comes to online transactions with credit cards. Of course this is all subjective from my own experiences, but I’m kind of reckless using cards so I’m probably a good test subject.
But most people here don't want credit cards; risk of spending what you don't have just works differently over there outside mortgages. And then this new stuff is just objectively better: debit cards, even though you will get the money back mostly, makes it a hassle as you basically pay the lowest fees possible and never credit so fraud really sucks. And makes no sense; away with those cards; we do not need them anymore.
try getting a refund for fraudulent card charge in other countries except the US.... most other banks in LATAM/EU will not simply "refund" you the money.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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..
> 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.
In reply to .3: bancontact is nearly free per operation, but credit card were percentage heavy fee per transaction... That's why. And don't forget that the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg will prefer debit over credit for payment.
Don't forget that the banking world is still under a lot of pressure from the various government (systemic risk assessment for example) and the stakeholders. It's a mess!
1. sounds nice though! But how do they verify that it's actually you? Just matching the photo manually? People are terrible at that. Or do they scan a fingerprint?
Even more than now there is a QR code format for SEPA Instant Payments. Some invoice have a QR code and when it is scanned with a bank app, the fields for a bank transfer are prefilled. IBAN, amount, etc...
We just need an app to generate this QR code for the amount one wants to request.
Wero doesn't change that as it's just another interface for SEPA instant payments. In its current version, it just adds phone numbers as an alias. Via the phone number you can also find out their full name and, after a transaction, their account number, as long as they've enabled Wero for their account.
They made it mandatory in NL not long ago iirc, or at least the validation now is and the bank doesn't let me leave the field blank. It does seem to be okay with variants of the name
I, too, would prefer to just be able to give people a random number to send money to. Isn't that a GDPR requirement anyway: data minimisation? Can they legally require this beyond their 90% of the law (that is, custody of the thing I'm trying to move)?
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
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
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.
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.
And at least its not just a random letter in the English language too! (looking at you X)
I hate random English words as company names. The other day I saw a company called Runway and it seemed interesting. Turns out there's quite a few companies called Runway or with a product called Runway, in the same industry.
Same with Bolt.
And I hate that Meta is now the company name so I can't look for meta stuff without also getting results about the company formerly known as Facebook.
The gibberish brand names on Amazon are a formulaic way to streamline trademark registration which Amazon requires for some features on their selling platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> You can do it once, and save in in your bank app.
I try not to send or write my IBAN just anywhere. With things like Direct Debit, I treat it with care. Sharp contrast with Paypal, where you can use your email address or even have a paypal.me page that does not expose your email at all.
> Isn't instant SEPA required to be supported by all banks now?
Yes, and yet I think it's not supported by all banks. Especially those that are not in the Euro area. One more thing - many people including me are to this day not informed or aware if instant payments are charged by banks or not. I honestly don't know.
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.
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.
I got some (bad?) news for you: Most Americans are either in complete denial over this or genuinely don't care. They don't think the wealth and lifestyles they enjoy have anything to do with the US' status as a global hegemon. Some even think the relationship is inverted, believing that as the world de-Americanizes, Americans will somehow benefit from this.
> Some even think the relationship is inverted, believing that as the world de-Americanizes, Americans will somehow benefit from this.
That may well be true of the working class, who receive nothing from the foreign income multinational corporations earn but face more competition to buy housing from the people who do receive a share, and more competition for jobs from foreigners (both immigration and globalization).
> They don't think the wealth and lifestyles they enjoy have anything to do with the US' status as a global hegemon.
> The people who hold these views are overwhelmingly not members of the working class. They're retirees or Gen-Xers coming off their peak earning years.
That implies young working class people think their lives would be worse if America does not remain a global hegemon.
I'd love to see your sources for that claim. That is not my impression. I have seen little if any support for American hegemony among the young.
It is entirely possible to recognize the things that are good about the US while also seeing the very terrible things. Nothing is perfect and if we tell ourselves it is by criticizing anyone who says otherwise, we are robbing not only the world but ourselves of any opportunity to make it better.
All I see on your timeline regarding us is blind sycophantic behavior. It's not self-loathing or sophomoric to recognize a point of policy or behavior that is not conducive to the wellbeing of global markets and wider well-being. We haven't been behaving in the best interest of the common good, or fellow Americans, nor even private interest for decades now and a little realization of that is just seeing objective reality.
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 maxima 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].
I question your sources methodology as, similar to travel habits during the performative COVID border lockdown, Canadians are still heading south en masse over the winter.
Okay that got a hearty laugh. I post a CBC article and you question it, then make a claim while offering no evidence at all.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to find that you're just here as an instigator, possibly not even from North America. Or, maybe I just want to hope that it's malice rather than incompetence that governs your behaviour.
Thanks. I probably am. I will never not confuse the two because I imagine getting into a comfortable place and then having to march up the next hill to discover an even comfier place that you can't see from where you are. I also imagine the instability of placing a boulder at the top of a hill and the effort of pushing it up a hill to find a new resting spot.
I'm sure I can invert the sign of something being measured to make my mental model work again :D
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.
So now that 8 years have passed since that article was written, do you have any idea how many Canadians have been banned from the US for life because they used marijuana in the past?
> credit card data can be stored in the United States, where it’s an open book to U.S. authorities, who don’t need a warrant to access it if it belongs to non-Americans
> A U.S. border guard could quickly put a Canadian in an impossible position — admit to marijuana use and be banned for that, or deny it and be banned for lying
The mechanism in the article is border agents analyzing your credit card purchases to see if you've bought legal weed. Has this become a common procedure? I've passed the border 50+ times in the last few years, I haven't yet had it happen to me. I've never had them bring up cannabis once, they've always seemed much more concerned about when I was leaving.
I think when it comes to something as important as border operations, it doesn't really add much to the conversation to share fear-mongering pieces from 8 years ago.
This is a _very_ fair criticism and worth pointing out.
I thought the piece wasn't particularly alarming and more just showing the opportunity exists, and cursory googles don't show any cases where it happened.
The problem I'm trying to point to is that we cooperate internationally because it benefits both countries or pushes towards a common goal- but when one of the cooperative speaks of turning that cooperation into a weapon, to me, makes it clear that the goal of the cooperation has changed.
It was threatened and just because Canada called what turned out to be a bluff, doesn't make that threat magically go away. Next time, is it a bluff or threat the USA will follow through on? We shouldn't be in this position in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We already have instant SEPA payments and most countries already have a version of this running, I think the idea is that this unifies it across europe. I can send money to any friend in 20 seconds with Bizum in Spain and a lot of merchants also accept Bizum.
I think the headline is misleading to the point of being childish.
It describes a consolidation of _online_ payment systems that are currently quite fragmented in the EU. It does nothing about in-store payments. Direct debit cards (10x as popular as credit cards in the EU) are often still MC/Visa powered, and the fastest way to pay contactless (even if that is via Apple Pay).
will depend on how it's implemented, you could end up paying via a QR code, contact less NFC, a phone number, the web. I think it could open up a lot of innovation
The payer couldn't care less about how much the store pays for the transaction. He or she just wants to tap with their phone, and the default here are Visa/MC cards. In addition to the transaction price not being an argument for the payer, Wero also afaik does not have as much consumer protection as (certainly some) credit cards offer. I also bet the average person doesn't understand or care about the whole political dispute either. Again, they just want to pay easily and safely.
I don't think Wero can "win" this from just the merchants side. It's got to be better for the customer's side.
"Hey buddy, I give you a tiny tiny discount if you pay without fraud protection..."
I mean, some places do that. But for the consumer there is no advantage. It's probably fine at cafés, restaurants and such. But why would you as a consumer want it for any more important purchase? As you mention.
That conveniently ignores the part where it refers to a fracturing where every part is hostile towards each other and unwilling to cooperate on anything. It's not a neutral term, it really is a rather offensive term for everyone from the Balkan today.
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.
Being n% more sovereign is better than not at all. It’s not that hard to switch providers down the road, it’s not the gotcha that some people think that is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I don't think it is. If you want people to move, you need to give them something. And SEPA but with phone numbers isn't it. At least not for me. Especially if it means that I am dependent on whether my bank implemented it.
I have recently seen people surprised when they sent a Wero transaction and the other party could see their IBAN.
PayPal isn't without flaws but I think buyer protections and the obfuscation of the banking info are genuine features for people. I would like a real competitor to PayPal in Europe. Maybe even something that is not from a private company.
What I fear is that people will try Wero, see that it's not what they wanted and then never go back. But maybe I'm wrong.
> 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
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.
Wero does introduce some sort of chargebacks and disputes, buy from reputable sellers and otherwise you are still free to use paypal for additional protection (but don't send money as "Friends & Family").
> Obfuscation of my banking data (IBAN)
IBAN is public facing and it is not a problem to share. It is the identifier of your account therefore required to make transfers. Money can't be charged with your IBAN. With paypal you share your e-mail.
> Having access to it with my bank
Your bank is the one that is providing the access to the Wero service, it will pull from or deposit into your bank account.
> Not needing to share my contact list
I don't see how this is required.
The strength of Wero is that it will be a unified friction less way of making digital transfers. It finds a similar place in the market that in the USA is filled by Venmo or Cash app however if you have a bank account you can use it.
I think it speaks volumes that no one within the Netherlands uses Paypal, but iDeal is the de-facto standard for all online payments there.
> Your bank is the one that is providing the access to the Wero service, it will pull from or deposit into your bank account.
I mean my bank is not available in Wero. And A lot of other banks are the same. PayPal or Klarna just works.
> IBAN is public facing and it is not a problem to share. It is the identifier of your account therefore required to make transfers. Money can't be charged with your IBAN. With paypal you share your e-mail.
I know but a lot of people don't see it that way. Not me. But I know they are.
> Not needing to share my contact list
AFAIK you need to sync your contacts to them to send a person money. I am not sure though because I don't have access.
Please don't misunderstand me. I want something like Wero in Europe. I just hope that it's not the wrong thing and people will be disappointed and less likely to try something new.
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?
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.
QR codes also decouples merchants from POS systems, so it's massively more flexible and step forward if people want to do stuff and get paid. Contactless payment is faster, but PRC also rolling out palm to pay which is much faster/convenient vs tap. IMO optimal coverage is probably QR codes and skipping tapping straight for palm scanning.
I don't think it's as big of an issue. China seems to be doing just fine when it comes to payment processing, and it's not the only country that works that way.
From a software freedom perspective, I actually prefer QR codes. The UX of tapping a card is a little better (though it also opens up an avenue for theft) but I think every phone I've held the past ten years has had some way to quickly scan a QR code from the lock screen, even if not every phone made the possibility obvious.
Yes. Physical cards are probably going away or becoming unusual in the medium term. A "credit card" or "debit card" will still exist, but not usually as a physical piece of plastic.
Instead of tapping or swiping the card, you tap the phone or watch, or scan a QR on your phone and then confirm in the bank app. Both ways seem to have similar useability to me, and an equivalent result. I've done both in different countries, and neither really bothered me. Yes, the tap method has higher potential for petty theft.
But why would we want to take a step back when we have contactless right now? This makes little sense... It is worse UX and does not work (I think) for quick things like taking the bus or underground.
Again, China has what is has because people had phones but no payment cards, and they don't have "software freedom" either (whatever that means): They are fully bound to the two providers (Alipay and WeChat) which provide accounts to a point now that is much worse that my dependency or Visa or Mastercard here in Europe because most places now do not accept anything else.
What would make sense is for the likes of Wero to find a way to support contactless so people can just tap exactly as they do now. As said by another commenter, this does not require a physical card (and already exists with Apple Pay and Google Pay). Frankly, Wero is a solution looking for a problem at this point in time...
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.
As far as different payment systems go I think gnu taler is the most compelling. If keeps the payer anonymous while letting the government know how much the payee received for tax purposes.
Somewhat tangential: With advent of LLMs that are very good at translating European languages into English, I think it is great that people are submitting non-English content. I support it 100%. I hope that we see more of it. It will help to expand our "HN Universe" to include more languages and content.
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 already an issue for tourists in many countries that have their own payment system (e.g. Brazil, India, Singapore, Thailand). In some of them you have companies that came up with products for tourists that allow them to pay but they usually come with fees. From what I know the majority of tourists in these countries just travel with cash.
anecdotally, a lot of argentina's apps that have a similar system "had" to develop an interop with brazil's PIX as a feature, ideally an endgame would be for these systems (wero, pix, other countries') to all standardize and integrate each other. would love something like that.
Those merchants will move to supporting more networks.
It's the same situation as Diners or Amex, they're supported wherever the merchant felt it made sense to go the extra mile. Touristic places typically pay attention to that.
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.
> The EuroPA alliance, which has already connected Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Andorra since March 2025, serves as a prototype. Six million euros have passed through it in one year, without any particular promotional campaign.
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.
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.
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.
European tech is often atrocious. Every single digital government program in France has been hacked, every social security number is out there, physical addresses tied to crypto wallets, etc.
It's very easy to understand: Paying by credit or debit card is incredibly easy and convenient for customers, and transactions have been instant for a long time, thanks to great technical infrastructure. While bank transfers still take days in some cases.
Most importantly: These cards give customers fraud protection, which is in many cases essential when making online purchases or when traveling. Which leads to more sales for sellers as well, when that worry is removed from the shoulders of customers.
Based on my recent experience, Discover is spotty in Europe but some places definitely accept it. Not that great if you're on vacation and want to avoid hassle, though. Discover is my main driver (both credit and bank) in the US, but I decided to use a Visa card in Europe just to avoid random rejections. But you won't be screwed in western Europe if all you have is a Discover card.
Really depends on the country. Discover acceptance is actually relatively good globally, as they have interconnections to Diners Club, JCB and China UnionPay.
The market for these kind of apps in Europe is very divided (just in the Nordics you have Swish, MobilePay and Vipps) but the dent in MC/Visas dominance is significant today. In 2 years, Klarna, Swish and Vipps will be more common both in e-commerce and POS that MC/Visa.
Do we need a pan-EU standard? I'm actually not so sure, but yes it would be nice when traveling.
I think it is a good initiative and a needed step in EU integration. I do think it is remarkable to frame this as a move towards more sovereignty. More EU integration has traditionally always been framed as giving up sovereignty by the member states. Now it is the other way around - thanks to the United States.
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.
If it's p2p transfers why not just use SEPA instant transfers? As for online payments and POS payments, I don't even remember the last time I used a physical card. It's always been Apple pay and I really don't care which card is being used by Apple Pay
A Wero payment is executed as a SEPA transfer. As an online store you don't want to ask customers to manually input a payment reference into a SEPA transfer. It's all about ease of use (and safety).
> As an online store you don't want to ask customers to manually input a payment reference into a SEPA transfer. It's all about ease of use (and safety).
How? With a SEPA transfer I can actually see who I'm paying. With a CC or equivalent it's a lottery.
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.
> installments, card on file and other typical services
These are typically cherished by the issuers and not really wanted/needed by the customer. Card installments in particular are the bane of our society IMHO and straight loans replace them properly.
Many banks in EU already had loan systems integrated to deal with oversized purchases and extraordinary months, so getting it out of the network doesn't remove the service to the customer in most cases.
We're kinda seeing this playing out with alternative payment systems in Asia for instance: they provide way less options, yet get very popular.because people just don't miss the extra stuff.
epi acquired idealo (in the Netherlands, and payconiq in Belgium/Luxembourg), slapped the wero brand on it, and announced proudly they have x million customers.
wero as a brand has close to 0 market recognition, and with idealo and payconiq they butchered some of the systems (in the name of consolidation) so badly that incidents have become the norm (and security wise ...yikes!).
Worth mentioning that epi is just the latest attempt at a pan-European payment system, the previous attempts, the Monnet project and PEPSI, failed miserably after wasting billions (tens of billions?) and ...it doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
I wish we could replace visa/mastercard but epi is absolutely not the solution, imho.
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.
Trump sanctions against ICC members and at least one human rights rapporteur has effectively debanked these people and made it very difficult for them to travel.
Protecting Rule of International Law against Rule of Trump Ukazi has become necessary.
Too bad that, for Italy, BancomatPay joined instead of Satispay, an app that's actually used (especially in the North). Almost nobody uses BancomatPay.
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.
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.
Wero started as Paylib [0], a French banks grouping used to provide phone number based payments between banks (and some banks also use it to provide NFC payments on android, instead of Google Wallet).
And also, Wero (unlike something like PayPal), is integrated in your bank's app, for (almost) all participating banks
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.
I don't see a way it wouldn't be offered in addition to. Some EU countries (e.g. Denmark) already do something similar where we a national debit card called "DanKort" (mashup of "Danmark" and "Kort" which translates to "Denmark" and "Card"). It typically also has a VISA part to it for usage abroad.
All stores accept this as well as VISA/Mastercard since they want to maximize who they can get money for, so it's already a common place practice for payment terminals to do this. Tourism alone is enough of a reason you would accept VISA/Mastercard still.
> I don't see a way it wouldn't be offered in addition to.
Yes, it will for most nation wide chains, touristic places, and anywhere that has comfortable margins.
For smaller shops and tighter business models, dropping the costlier networks will be the first thing they do. Same way a decent number of shops won't accept Amex, or just no card at all.
Now if we're is cheap and popular enough, there might be more stores getting rid of cash as a reaction.
We’re seeing the opposite in the US where smaller shops aren’t taking cash, presumably so they don’t have to deal with managing it. There is a cost, but I’m sure every business has already priced goods accordingly to pass those fees onto the consumer.
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.
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.
Thank you Trump - I guess?!
It's great for Europe to wake up and for pointing out we need to decouple from the US and become more tech independent.
It's bad enough that the whole world is financing the debt of the USA and every person therein.
I hope, that in the long run, our democratic values and freedom will become more and more attractive. Especially when all other players become autocratic regimes. That is, if we realize this freedom is not a given and we are willing to put in the work.
In Austria I'm always in the situation that shops and restaurants are unhappy that I pay by card because they claim that even a direct debit card cost them some large percentage through the terminal provider.
Will these new systems remove the middle man skimming that MasterCard/Visa has been doing to small businesses?
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.
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.
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.
The nasty element of that reward situation, and why I am deeply in favour of the European choice here, is that while some people get nice rewards, some people just pay much higher prices and don't get rewards. So this actually worsens the divide between rich and poor to an extent, and that's just bad policy.
> 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.
This is spot on. I consider myself an outlier, but only since not long ago. I’ve been using a credit card for everything but only because it gets me points I can exchange for miles on some airlines or exchange for gift cards.
I wish the “old school” banks here were more competitive in this regard.
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.
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.
I think this is misleading as a few other folks say -- otherwise you'd expect Visa/Mastercard stock to drop dramatically at losing that many folks in a single announcement.
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.
I am deeply, profoundly, emphatically uninterested in your "teams". Your local news are not relevant to us. What the rest of the world sees is US foreign policy, and the mainstream sentiment in every other Western nation right now is one of second-hand embarrassment.
This is DonHopkins we're talking about. Just be glad it was one line, as opposed to a lengthy off-topic screed relitigating online arguments from 40 years ago, complete with a mention of how he invented pizza menus.
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.
> 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.
Is it? Am I? As a former Sanders caucuser who didn't fall for his supporters' both sides bullshit, perhaps some self-reflection on why running a candidate who's only popular with white people in Iowa would inevitably lose is in order.
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.
Thinking there’s no such thing as ethical capitalism is laughable. Your purity test is counter productive and ultimately just doomer signaling. Sure I get it billionaires are fuckkng us over but that has more to do with the failure of US democracy than capitalism.
I caucused for Sanders 2016 in Iowa. He lost the primary fair and square, and was mathematically eliminated before superdelegates even factored into the contest at all. Sanders had zero appeal outside of white, college-educated people like myself, whereas Clinton was very popular with minorities and white, college-educated people. She was just a better candidate for the Democrat primary, and if you want to win the general as a Dem, you have to win the primary first.
Blaming the media, capitalism, Debbie whatshername and insider elites is just Bernie Bro conspiracy theory making excuses for a bad, unpopular candidate.
> late stage capitalism
This is not a coherent concept, it's a term that doomers use to blame all of their bugbears with western society on shadowy cabals of nebulous elites. Ethical capitalism is, in fact, real – Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich and Teddy Roosevelt are all examples.
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.
What a ridiculous strawman. A huge chunk of Americans are also calling for the end of the Visa/MasterCard duopoly and would love to jump on board to this.
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.
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.
> “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.
Wero is for internet payments, but Visa and Mastercard are still involved for card payments. I just got a new-style Dutch debit card and it has a Mastercard logo on it; Visa cards are also still being given out.
The idea is that merchants will ditch the card-pos in the long run. You scan a QR-code or send money through some app. Satispay does that in Italy and got massive rollout from stores because fees were pretty low also for smaller transfers, so no more "sorry, at least 5 euros to pay with card"
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.
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.
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.
We're entering an era of "tech nationalism". China has been completely vindicated for esssentially not allowing their country and economy to be held hostage to foreign tech companies. It would be an era of "tech colonialism". Look into the century of humiliation, gunboat diplomacy, the opium wars, etc and see why China might not be on board for that.
Europe collectively is a US vassal state, not just in tech. As an example, if someone in Switzerland Venmos someone in the Netherland with a description of "Cuba" or even "Cuban" (sandwich), the payment could be delayed or you could be banned entirely [1]. Why should a payment between two Europeans in Europe be entangled with US sanctions?
The danger here for European "tech emancipation" is that the US government will get involved and fight the fights for US companies. The United Fruit Company was the poster child for this where the US deposed the Guatemalan government in 1954 and the 60+ years of Cuban sanctions are basically because the UFC was cheating on Cuban taxes.
Brazil's Pix (IMHO) will come under the pressure of this on behalf of Visa/Mastercard that may include trade retaliation and other forms of pressure and the US government will argue that Pix is "illegally" subsidized by the government. Europe's payment systems will face the same attacks.
The ship has already sailed and the US is simply refusing to recognize it. Yes, in the short term there will be tantrums thrown and threats made, but it won't prevent the middle powers from diversifying away from the US.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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, the merchant website runs a spinner for like 10 seconds while it confirms it in the background, and then you get a confirmation of your purchase with an order number.
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.
Also what problems did it solve that we actually have? Without that, there's no incentive for change.
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.
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.)
The UPI payment system in India seems to work really well. I'm not sure about the architecture exactly, but there seems to be a way to generate one-time passwords that you can use to pay people a fixed amount. E.g. you go to a website or store, and they display a QR code for payment, which contains the payment recipient information and amount of the charge. When you scan it, you are taken to your bank app where you authorize the recipeint and the amount, then you are given a special code in the form of a QR code or alphanumeric code. The person recieving the payment can scan the code to recieve payment ... or if you are online you can paste the alphanumeric code. No other information is exchanged. There's nothing that can compromise your ID or account info.
Pretty amazing!
Insane that a developing country has something so seemless, and meanwhile in the USA my credit card number is stolen online every 3 to 5 years, necessitating cancellations and in some cases (as with Chase) I had to close the entire account as they could not stop the fraud even after issuing 5 new cards over the space of 6 months--somehow the new card authorizations were being ported automatically into some subscription systems.
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.
Norway passed a law quite recently forbidding permanent card only shops, cafes, etc. As far as I can tell this was done for two reasons, firstly card only is discriminatory and secondly to improve the countries resilience in the face of cyber attacks.
You can only be electronic payments only if you are a temporary sales location such as a flea market, ice cream van, etc.
The point of budgeting via "cash stuffing" instead of the invisible shuffling of money through a bank card, is something that in retrospect is something similar to what I did when I was younger - the cash in my wallet is getting low, so I should hold back on expenditures.
It lists some issues, like "The number of automated teller machines (called a minibank in Norwegian) has also declined, and most of them recently started charging a fee of NOK 10 (USD 1) to withdraw cash. If more people start using cash again, that may change."
Can you perhaps tell me how things have changed in the last couple of years?
I see 10 people in my address book that I could theoretically send money via Wero. Hundreds of people in my address book have a Visa or a MasterCard. It's not a bad thing to have competition and ambition, but to say goodbye is premature to say the least. Online payments especially between regular people (so not businesses) are still dominated by PayPal. And even online shopping is dominated by PayPal although Apple and Google Pay are taking a bigger slice because it's just so convenient. And they're just again using Visa and MasterCard.
I'm not sure Wero was developed to be very practical. I registered with my phone number, but now have second thoughts because I don't want to give my phone number to strangers when buying on second hand marketplaces. But guess what - you cannot change it. You cannot register a second number. It just feels very rigid in its design.
There were other systems already that were supposed to do the same. Girocard/EC... All dead and buried now.
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`"
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.
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
Good. Now the same has to happen for the software industry.
Unfortunately EU officials also can not be trusted. They are indeed weak. So we all know in the long run, the USA always gets favourable deals and Europans are kept as proxy-payers here. Germany in particular has a very unhealthy love affair going with the USA; to some extent this is understandable due to an export-centric industry, but now there is a recession and Germany still thinks it'll go away soon, "just don't change anything". Timid rabbits, with Merz being the uber-rabbit that just does nothing useful on his own. Other than risking being a loudmouth before he was elected - and now germans are very unhappy with his performance.
This is good for the world given the situation in the USA today. The folks in the US who voted for this will never understand how badly they fucked up.
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.
> 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.
That sounds worse to be honest. You're essentially asking for the government to be not only aware of but also able to control all digital payments. That upends how money has worked over (literally) millenia, and is an incredible risk to take. Giving someone in government the ability to block someone's payments and trusting they won't abuse it might be fine as long as good people remain in power, but do you really want to bet the entire nation's ability to live life on that?
Furthermore, wouldn't determining if a payment is legal require prying into details of the transaction that may violate your privacy? And if they make an incorrect determination based on stuff that really wasn't their business in the first place, they now have the force of government behind them, going far beyond merely declining the transaction.
I would think what you should want to advocate for is a system that cannot block payments (at least domestically) just like with cash, and enforcement either happens prior to enrollment, or after the fact through some other traditional law enforcement mechanism (warrants, etc.).
Not intending to defend either system but private financial institutions basically end up deputized as enforcement arms of anti money laundering and sanctions in the US and probably other countries where the payments systems are privatized. That's a why every bank has a big compliance department - the laws say a lot about who and what they can serve and they have to be on top of it.
Which yes means sometimes legit transactions that match rules meant to catch money laundering and other shady business get blocked or flagged. Sometimes out of avoidance of legal risk, rather than actual certainly anything illegal is happening.
I don't know if the centralized government implementation would be any better in that regard, but at least you could complain to the government instead of having a bank hide behind a law they didn't write but have to enforce.
Credit cards, iDeal, SWIFT, Paypal, Venmo, etc are all fully traceable. Anonimity at the protocol level is not a design goal for any of these.
Being worse is debatable: the main difference is the government being able to execute blocking on their own, vs having to convince all banking institutions to do it for them - doesn't sound hard as the govt will always have all the leverage.
Also important to note that BCB (the central bank in Brazil) is autonomous, and technically protected from political influence, thought that ground has been proven shaky.
Worse? Are you serious?
In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry. In EU. When 2 countries from you, there is a FCKIN' war happening.
Only because France, Germany, UK and similar countries are against guns and against self-defense, where your only option is to lay on the ground and let the attacker kill you.
Luckily we can still use guns for self-defense, we can conceal carry by default and we will fight EU laws till our death for this.
(pepper sprays, knives and even katana, whatever. Heh that's a joke, but for real, you can use that without any permit, in theory.)
EU Brusel is trying very hard to force these idiotic laws to every country.
Eg.: they forced limited mags for rifles.
We have bypassed that with local law haha, when you get a gun permit (which is not easy, but not impossible) you just fill a paper with "a gun buy order" for the police and you are by law allowed to have unlimited magazine, silencer and special JHP ammo. Reason self-defense and defense of your property (default reason, police will only check same thing they've checked for gun permit. Your criminal record).
And also luckily we don't need to use anything, because our criminality is a liiiiitle bit lower than France, Germany and UK. You know why.
But tide is changing, Poland will be biggest economy in EU in few years and their gun laws are also changing and we have a lot of common with them.
I believe together with other reasonable countries (Slovakia, Hungary etc.) We will overturn this idiocy comming from France, Germany and other "west" countries.
Btw I'm for EU, even for federalization of EU. But with US approach. EU should be no.1 country, yes country, in the world.
> In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry.
I don't think that's how its supposed to work. So IF you're correct and a French entity of any kind is found breaking current Czech laws, THEN this must be reported and action must be taken against it, no matter the law, no discussions here.
> Only because France, Germany, UK and similar countries are against guns and against self-defense, where your only option is to lay on the ground and let the attacker kill you.
This is a big reduction to the absurd, and unnecessarily inflammatory. I'm no dang, but I would ask you to please refrain from such things, in the name of civil discourse. It could have been dishonestly framed in a number of other ways, for example, "Poland as a country is pro-violence and pro-crime, since they are arguably fond of shooting people". I know this must not be as simple, as "laying on the ground and letting the attacker kill you" does not look like a sound defense strategy. However, gun collecting and sports are not, to me, good reasons for owning firearms. To each their own.
> Luckily we can still use guns for self-defense, we can conceal carry by default and we will fight EU laws till our death for this.
> (pepper sprays, knives and even katana, whatever)
Wow, go Brussels I guess. Hope they can eventually implement the "idiotic laws" that make people unable to kill each other with katanas.
>In EU, Czechia. Foreign(french lol) banks are banning accounts because you work in gun manufacturing industry. In EU. When 2 countries from you, there is a FCKIN' war happening.
That shouldn't be happening. French banks on Czech soil should operate under Czech, not French laws. Otherwise the Czech banking authorities should go after them. Something is fishy about that.
Also, which banks do French citizens working in the arms industry use if they're not allowed to? This is all very bizarre.
Yes this is very bizarre.
But this is official story, contractors and employees who worked for Czech arms manufacturer got their personal! accounts disabled.
They had mortgages in these accounts and bank notify them to move mortgage elsewhere.
Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Goodbye.
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/czech-banks-discriminate-agai...
> Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Goodbye.
Wow this sucks. One thing I took from this comment (and the previous one), if you allow me to (badly) synthesize is: we might need less policy making and more policy enforcement.
>Reason given by bank, broken internal policy, we cannot disclose which. Ridiculous.
I'm sure what they did was illegal, the problem with such cases is that even if you take them to court and win, you'll still lose a lot of time, money and stress in the process of fighting a bank in court, while for the bank the lawsuit is just another small business expense.
Centrain industries and businesses tend to act above the law even if they know they're in the wrong simply because the punishments if they get caught are too lax.
That's why I'm a big fan of direct personal accountability. Like the person working at the bank who made the choice to close the accounts should go to jail. Because otherwise nefarious people simply hide behind the accountability shield of a large org where nobody is responsible for anything and accountability is always deflected.
Like big tech they may refuse service when they like to (which is crazy)
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.
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.
I have been using iDeal for many years now and have yet to see any of the downsides of it being a product of a commercial bank.
Perhaps it's a difference in banking culture between different countries; I would certainly not put the same trust and faith in a Wero alternative set up by American banks, that's for sure.
Banks are beholden to policy from the central bank and financial authorities. Payment fees are capped, payment processing terms aren't a free-for all, and the power of individual banks is kept in check. The people doe have a voice in all of this, just not in the direct implementation process.
You cannot do a chargeback on iDeal, but I don't think that is related to it being a product of commercial banks.
The American companies Mastercard and Visa are subject to American rule of law. In the case of a criminal or authoritarian president, such is an issue. You can see how Russian assets got frozen and SWIFT stopped working for Russia after they did the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Should the USA invade Greenland, they could stop bank payments done via Mastercard or Visa networks.
So for sovereignty, we are better off without USA. We should also transfer our gold and other assets out of USA, since the country is moving towards fascism.
Imagine old Europe counting their own beans. The level of absurdity to outsource it to whomever...
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.
Bit like Moldova automating government because there simply was no money for armies of overpaid burocrates.
Wait until you see that ECB is shared between European states central banks that themselves shared between each country commercial banks
The ECB is directly governed by European Union law. Its capital stock, worth €11 billion, is owned by all 27 central banks of the EU member states as shareholders.[6] The initial capital allocation key was determined in 1998 on the basis of the states' population and GDP, but the capital key has been readjusted since.[6] Shares in the ECB are not transferable and cannot be used as collateral.
-- Italian Central bank As of early 2024, the 15 largest shareholders represented slightly over half of the bank's equity, namely UniCredit (5.0 percent), Cassa nazionale di previdenza ed assistenza per gli ingegneri ed architetti liberi professionisti [it] (4.9 percent), Fondazione ENPAM [it] (4.9 percent), Cassa nazionale di previdenza e assistenza forense [it] (4.9 percent), Intesa Sanpaolo (4.9 percent), Cassa nazionale di previdenza e assistenza dei dottori commercialisti [it] (3.7 percent), BPER Banca (3.3 percent), ICCREA Banca (3.1 percent), Generali Italia (3.0 percent), the National Institute for Social Security (3.0 percent), Istituto nazionale per l'assicurazione contro gli infortuni sul lavoro (3.0 percent), Cassa di Sovvenzioni e Risparmio fra il Personale della Banca d'Italia [it] (3.0 percent), Cassa di Risparmio di Asti (3.0 percent), Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (2.8 percent), and Crédit Agricole Italia (2.8 percent). The remaining 49 percent were dispersed among 157 shareholders, mainly banks and banking foundations.[49]
That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.
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
If I had the Swiss government instead of the US Federal Government I'd trust it a lot more too.
It's a joke but Visa and Mastercard are American corporations so Americans can feel relatively secure using them. If you live in another developed country, relying on the whims of American entities feels less secure than something subject to the laws of your own country.
American consumers have no democratic control of that duopoly either.
Americans are pretty aware that government by large, multinational, unaccountable corporations sucks and has basically all of the downsides of big government without any of the accountability upsides.
American media may be less likely to share that narrative with you. But the actual people figured this out a while ago and they're mad.
Dang has stated these sorts of comments do not belong on HN news. Discussion of specifics are fine, but nationalist slurs are not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100358
Edit: wow, my bad. HN really loves low effort nationalistic slurs as entire comments now.
What's the slur here? American? Mind?
I'm American, and I wasn't offended. Because it's true, we actually can't comprehend this because we are the poster child of government via huge corporations. We literally don't know what it's like to have a functioning and trustworthy government handling these things, it's completely foreign to us.
I don't think that's a slur, my friend. I think it's a statement of the American mindset. Then again, I'm not American, what do I know.
I'm American. Definitely did not think this was a slur.
I strongly disagree. Substitute with 'the Chinese mind can't comprehend' or 'the Palestinian mind can't comprehend' or 'the Muslim mind can't comprehend' or 'the African American mind can't comprehend' or 'the immigrant mind can't comprehend'. Obviously that would be a slur and not an acceptable way to phrase a point.
HN rightly didn't allow these type of generalization comments against Russians after it invaded Ukraine. HN rightly doesn't allow these types of generalization comments at Palestinians. It's wild to me the different standard applied lately to similar comments towards Americans. Definitely a discourse erosion/strain going on on this site when it comes to certain topics/nationalities/generalization of peoples and stereotyping/labeling.
In the link I gave dang set the rule that these sort of comments applied towards a nationality aren't acceptable here and an instance of dang actively stepping in to enforce it.
America was literally founded on this premise, and it should come as no surprise that our government has (d)evolved into what the founders felt was inevitable.
America is fairly exceptional in that it's not racist to say "Americans are ____" given it's a melting pot of so many different races and cultures. That's a beautiful thing, but something that the white supremecists in control of the US are working to erode.
Edit: damn I think this account is actually a bot. It's only pro Israel talking points, islamaphobia, and appeals to the mod to get people banned.
dangs rule is about nationality, not ethnicity. "You can't post nationalistic slurs to HN" Wanting consistent enforcement of standards is not wrong on my part. HN routinely attempts such with HN posters routinely calling out when comments are not in line with HN standards. Am I misunderstanding community enforcement on HN?
India is made up of an incredible mix of ethnic peoples. Yet saying 'the Indian mind can't comprehend' would be considered a slur.
Your thinly veiled attempt to align me with white supremacists is EXTREMELY out of line.
As is calling me a bot out of line. Ad hominems that I am a bot because I push back on topics HN SPECIFICALLY chose to make an exception for (look at my comments prior to that since you are digging through looking for character assisnations) is unreasonable on your part. Either discussion is open on the topic, or it should not be allowed. Not some weird space when only one sides perspective on the topic is tolerated and having challenging views makes one a bot. Again during discussion on Russia's invasion, it was not allowed to call people defending Russia/Russians bots. There seems to be erosion/strain of standards here since then.
Nothing I have said is islamaphobic. One can challenge ideas/religions. Bringing up their history/failings is not phobic but is needed to push for productive/healthy change.
As was recently pointed out to me, you might want to look to PGs thoughts on discussion and adjust how you respond to thoughts you disagree with. https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I will admit I'm old so I don't have a lot relevant to ad to a lot of current tech discussions here but I will try to add more.
Trust Switzerland? Protonmail is literally fleeing Switzerland. You now have to upload Government ID to use any online service with more than 5k users!! They are also now requiring backdoors (Article 50a). Literally the end of privacy!
It's honestly depressing no one talks about this, or even knows about this.
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.
Oh, 100%. But the choice here is between European banks and a state-run Pix equivalent.
Do they deserve your trust?
The government? Either the national government or the EU get legitimacy by being democratic instructions. That doesn't mean they get blind faith, it is healthy to scrutinize their actions.
US corporations on the other hand get only my contempt and scorn.
I even trust EU more than the local corrupt country governments.
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.
Lagarde is not a convicted criminal. She was convicted for negligence, but this is not a criminal conviction.
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.
Lets see. Gerhard Schroeder, fled to RU. Nicolas Sarkozy, convicted. Silvio Berlusconi, convicted. Geert Wilders, convicted. Slobodan Milošević, convicted. Jean-Marie Le Pen, convicted. Marine Le Pen, convicted.
Donald Trump, convicted (pardoned everyone who attempted a coup on Jan 6 2021).
Victor Orban, surely he'll get convicted.
Benjamin N., Vladimir P.: wanted by ICC.
(This excludes cases like Jan Maršálek / Wirecard fraud / GRU spy. Also, have a peak at all the cleaning Zelenski's government had to do, including in his inner circle.)
Seems we in Europe at least are attempting to uphold the rule of law. I can't say the same for US corporations or US government, given the current administration. That being said... can we stop voting for these narcissistic criminals? Thank you in advance.
I met Mr Schröder on Saturday in the Opera. I can therefore vouch that he is not in Russia.
> attempted a coup
funny everyone forgot to bring guns for the coup
I assume the concern is more about moving to mandated digital currency where every transaction is tracked by the government, no cash allowed.
> 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.
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
Not if your government properly implements separation of powers, as is the case in most Western countries.
Yes, I'm aware someone is trying to undermine it in the U.S. currently. That doesn't mean that companies are a safe haven suddenly.
in some countries you can vote for your government and hold it accountable.
This reminds me of how all the drug dealers use USPS because it actually requires a warrant to open the package.
If the government has to enforce banking KYC/AML itself they won't be able to hide behind all the third party fuck-fuck games and they'll get sued into oblivion. I'm sure they'll play the normal federal court and sovereign fuck-fuck games but it would be glorious trying to watch them try to enforce the BSA and Patriot act bullshit while not being able to hide behind the auspice it's just a private bank collecting the data.
Until such governements have already loopholes to circumvent rules of law, I'm as sad as the next guy but the EU technically has that.
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.
I've found it funny how many people still believe that most places in the US don't take Discover. I almost exclusively use my Discover card and the number of times I've had it declined is a tiny fraction of a percent. Most people also don't seem to realize that Discover is also a bank, so you can use it for both credit and checking/savings. So yeah, you likely don't have to be forced to use the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. The only time I've recently used one of my Visa cards was when I visited Europe where I found much more places don't accept Discover, although there were still many that did.
Hopefully the acquisition of Discover by Capital One results in lower processing fees so the network broadens globally and makes the notion that Discover isn't viable a thing of the past.
Why is this downvoted? While slightly sarcastic, you make a good point.
Is it possible to get a UnionPay (China) or JCB (Japan) credit card issued by a European bank? That would be very interesting. I assume in the last 10 years, there is way more acceptance of UnionPay in Europe. UnionPay is widely accepted all over East and South East Asia these days because there are so many Chinese tourists.
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.
Costco?
[Edit] -- And I've frequented several independent coffee shops that are cashless.
Costco doesn't even accept Mastercard (credit cards), so they're kind of a unique case here where they intentionally choose to only accept one particular type of credit cards.
Guessing they have their own branded card that they push you to use?
Fair enough, it's probably not as common as I think and is more of a reputation.
Theres a natural tension here, because in order for this to be true you need a diverse market with many competitors. But that is bad usually, because it's extremely inefficient, so it gets optimized out. The monopolies we see are indeed an optimization - the natural climax of a developing market.
Consider payments: you do not want to carry around 100 different cards and trinkets just to pay for things in your daily life, right? And for merchants, they do not want to make deals with 100 different companies to accept payments, right? So what's the end result?
We see the monopolies in the US economy because our economy is very efficient. It could be even more efficient - consider, for example, how much time and money could be saved if only one phone OS existed.
But then of course that's bad for you, the consumer, because then these huge corporations rule your life and can essentially do whatever they want.
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.
And a government is pre-locked in.
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.
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.
Do corner stores (small informal convenience stores) in Brasil usually accept PIX? I assume they all cash-only.
Also: What is PIX uptake/penetration like in the countryside? China is shocking how fast that countryside wet/farmer's markets started accepting AliPay. Literally, you can buy a kilo of pumpkin (namguo) using nothing but your mobile phone with AliPay, and the old lady running the stand (in a wet market) probably has a 6th grade education. (No hate on that!)
(Brazilian here).
> Do corner stores (small informal convenience stores) in Brasil usually accept PIX? I assume they all cash-only.
Pretty much every single one I've always been to. From the smallest one-person street corner popup shop to the biggest shopping mall boutique and outlets, virtually everyone accepts PIX payments. Its just better - its one of those "you gotta use it to understand" things.
Anecdotally: I've even gave some cash to homeless people on occasion using PIX. This may seem weird, but in Brazil, you must have a bank account to be able to subscribe to any sort of government benefits, and since its free, pretty much everyone has an account and therefore can receive PIX payments. Its also safer, since you're not carrying cash with you, and even if you're somehow forced to transfer, there are ways to monitor and reverse transactions (so called MED).
https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/pix-seguranca
Of course, there's been a few incidents over the years where some concerned citizens would not accept PIX payments because "the government will know what you're spending on" (in contrast to, say, credit card operators, where apparently the "right people" would know what you're spending on...).
There are some criticisms of the current system, which is fair, but most that I have heard are ideological in nature or some sort of foreign defaultism.
In Africa they've had this since ~2005 with the Mpesa system. It basically transfers cellphone credits as payment. In certain regions everyone with a dumb phone was hooked up and you could do anything from buy a coconut from a guy on the side of the road to pay your taxi driver to pay at the supermarket.
Wow, this is a great reply! "In Africa" -> Can you share a few countries? Google tells me that East Africa is the biggest users: Kenya, Tanzania, etc. (No hate on the use of "In Africa here"... as Google tells me it is used in at least 10 different African countries.)
Replying here to throwaway2037 because I can't reply directly to him, but yes, even most informal businesses accept PIX, including some random guy selling candy or bottled water at a stop signal.
The only exception I have found to consistently refuse PIX are some parking lots, and they refuse credit cards as well, accepting only cash, probably to hide their earnings.
You only have a potential choice until a company buys out all its competitors and surpresses the rest.
> 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?
Duopoly is bad. We should work to fix that. A monopoly is worse.
Especially now in the (former) USA.
The choice is between the ECB and visa/mastercard (who are de-facto controlled by the US government).
It's a shit situation we're in, but the ECB seems like the lesser evil.
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.
???
Wrong thread?
The comment I see reads like this:
"That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine."
Yeah the concept of "Western" is a relic of the Cold war, just like Western Europe / Eastern Europe ( past some countries being genuinely there ) It's still taught like that to younger people, but definitely shouldn't.
> 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?
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.
>on the West of what?
On the West of every single country in Europe, to start with.
Don't take this the wrong way, but have you looked at a world map? I ask since a significant chunk of people from the US cannot find Mexico on a map ...
Aside from its very evident geographic location, Brazil was the site of the first lasting European colony in the Americas established by Portugal.
People in Brazil speak Portuguese[1], a Romance language derived from Latin and closely related to Spanish, French and Italian.
The genetic lineages most commonly found within the Brazilian population include Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and to a much lesser degree but still significant, Lebanese and Turkish [2].
The top countries whose citizens visit Brazil as tourists are overwhelmingly from the Americas and Europe: Argentina, the USA, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy and the UK.
Likewise, when Brazilians travel abroad, their main destinations are Argentina, the USA, Chile, Portugal, France, Italy, Uruguay, the Caribbean, Spain and the UK.
Share of exports to Asia: ~41%
Share of exports to the Americas and Europe combined: ~47%
Share of imports from Asia: ~43%
Share of imports from the Americas and Europe combined: ~50%
How could one reach the conclussion that Brazil is an "Eastern" country? Oh yeah, they joined a trade organization with China and Russia ... sure, they must be Eastern now.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_Brazil
> very evident geographic location
I agree that Brazil is Western, because it obviously is; it's a former European colony that speaks a European language and has European religious and cultural values. But geography has nothing to do with the concept of "Westernness", beyond historical etymology. Australia and New Zealand are as much part of "the West" as Canada is.
i recently got interviewed by company in the UK. The Operations Chief thought Mexico was in Spain... jeez.
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.
The West is UK, Western Europe, Australia, Canada, US, Scandinavia. I agree that Japan is a really interesting one that shares a lot with the West, but doesn't have the same cultural roots. I wouldn't be opposed if they wanted to be counted as part of the West, but I don't know if they would.
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.
That was said exactly when that guy first came years ago. I'll bet my money ( via Wero or not ) the whole movement will be shattered by an " European-friendly " governement. Perhaps private companies will still retain a bad sentiment, who knows, everything else will be business as usual.
I don't know. Things feel meaningfully different this time around.
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!
Zero fees for an individual, by regulation. Companies pay for PIX usage. Some banks waive these fees, and it is comparable to debit card transaction fees.
And magically things are much cheaper when you do this, both because they're actually cheaper without individual billing and associated overhead, and because the few larger payers have a powerful incentive to ensure they pay as little as possible.
For day-to-day payments, GNU Taler seems like the best option by far, since it protects the customers’ anonymity. (It’s essentially like digital cash.) Unfortunately, only very few banks support it at the moment.
https://www.taler.net/en/
This is a brilliant response. I love personal anecdotes like this that meaningfully contribute to a better conversation on HN.
First: PIX sounds insanely good! I wish I had it where I live.
My follow-up question: Can anyone with experience with India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) comment about capabilities compared to PIX? It is frequently lauded as one of the best e/mobile payment services in the (developing) world.
Judging from what I am reading about PIX capabilities, UPI can do everything. It can also allow you to make merchant payments from Rupay credit cards. It also supports automatic recurring payments.
> 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.
> 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.
If I get sent a fake (or no) product by someone halfway around the world there's absolutely no way I'm getting my money back in small claims court.
Then use a service that offers escrow. I don't need my groceries to use insurance for the eventuality that the store goes belly-up in the 2 days until I can check that the products arrived in good order
Base payment products should just do payment at operating margins rivaling a non-profit. It's public infrastructure
I'm quite happy with the status quo that I don't need to negotiate escrow with every random online service or store.
> 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.
(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.
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.
> This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards
Which illustrates one of the most prolific examples of regulatory capture.
Credit cards became mainstream because of that protection, which was a triumph for the payment processors. Whatever they spent on lobbying was a bargain.
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).
> Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.
Visa/Mastercard aren't handling chargebacks, the banks are. With PIX the way to get a chargeback is the same: if you've been victim of fraud you open a claim with the bank, they'll review it, then possibly give you a charge back within a week. This review process might take longer or be denied, which requires a lawsuit.
But it's only less risky for banks to chargeback immediately on Visa/Mastercard because they make so much money from credit card fees that they can afford it.
False. There are mechanisms to undo PIX transactions. One such mechanism is the MED (official tool by the Central Bank). It can be used to help victims of scams, fraud and operating failures on the part of institutions so they can recover the cash).
https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/pix-seguranca
There's also the different insurance plans offered by mostly all banks and payment-adjacent businesses.
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
Insurance like that is normally because if the potential size of the loss. Losing a house is way more than most people could stand. A closer example might be buying the extra service contract on every electronics purchase you make: that's usually a bad deal.
> 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...
If they'd come close to such chargebacks, they'd already be kicked out of the system and blocked.
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.
Am I mistaken or hasn't that been capped to 100% for a while?
You're describing the concept of insurance.
I know ;)
I can't imagine in what world it sounds like a good idea to attach an extra insurance product as a mandatory step to use cash online. Feel free to take out insurance for every 5€ product you buy online but I don't want to pay an extra % of my income to the finance industry just to use the money I've earned
Brazil has a huge advantage in that they've required full transaction-level transparency for tax authorities -- with clearly defined technical requirements -- for almost 20 years now. One can argue whether it's a pro or a con to share this level of detail with the federal government, but it certainly makes taxation easier and fraud prosecution simpler, too.
Visa/Mastercard provides that because the US is a very untrustworthy country. I don't know the situation in Brazil, but here in Europe small claims court just works fine. I think it's pretty dysfunctional to have to rely on private companies for adequate legal protection.
(Brazilian here)
It works (passably) well here as well. However there's widespread lack of basic civic awareness which makes it harder for people to even know they could be settling such things on small claims court.
> Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.
This is no longer the case outside US. Last time I had the account of one of the few credit cards I'm using (on the Visa or Mastercard networks), for transactions I should have been clearly reimbursed / credited, as it used to be the case, actually awarded in my favor, was four years ago. Recent transactions, with proven vendor at fault, ended up with my loss. All over Europe (Im traveling a lot). So no tears shed for Visa or Mastercard losing the EU turf.
It's not the visa/mastercard that offer chargeback, but the bank.
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.
Good, that's a feature - I don't need my payment processor to have value judgments on my spending.
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.
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.
I've used BLIK once, for an online payment from the Netherlands to Poland, and for that it was terrible. I assume it's much better integrated into the Polish system.
> BLIK from Poland was there earlier
BLIK was launched in 2015 according to Wikipedia; iDeal is from 2005.
iDeal from 2005 is not Wero ;-)
iDeal can also be used for recurring payment. I set one up yesterday.
If you like Tikkie, you may like bunq as well.
This is kind of a problem with Wero though [1]:
> The Wero app can be installed on any mobile device or tablet running iOS 16 or later, or Android version 9 or later. We recommend updating your device to the latest version of its operating system for maximum performance, convenience and security.
> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.
Why the ** am I constricted to using an app on Android or iOS. Ever heard of laptops? Windows? ChromeOS? macOS? Linux in general?
[1] https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...
banks really like hardware attestation and putting that in laptops and PCs causes serious pushback from people like us here. not an option to not have hardware attestation on mobile - it's been there since day 1, there's nothing to protest against anymore
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.
It's in theory already possible with iDeal from what I can tell (I've seen companies that use subscriptions set up an initial iDeal payment and then convert it into a regular recurring SEPA Direct Debit), but I'm going to assume that the process is kind of messy since I haven't seen many companies implement the system in that way.
Direct Debit is very nice, largely because your bank manages the subscription; companies have to declare the payment ahead of time and if you get balance mixed up for some reason, then the bank will just do the payment whenever your balance is correct if it happens within a week. I've had credit cards decline on subscriptions before because I didn't have enough loaded up on them. Never had that issue with SEPA.
Either that or "credit cards just work", so very few entities bothered until now.
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.
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.
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).
> 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
> 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.
this is not true. the IBAN alone is insufficient to authorize a direct debit.
No. The bank gives you a prominent notification when someone new gets a direct debit authorization for your account. And a merchant gets banned quickly when they misuse their debit authorization.
> pre-authorization
If you need pre-authorization use credit, iDeal is a debit system.
> It hands over the customer's IBAN
SEPA Direct Debit requires my consent one time on my banking app.
Giving out your IBAN number is generally safer then giving out your Credit card number, date of expiration and cvv code.
Additionally it allows for things like name to account checking, therefore making it less likely you will be scammed.
I was under the impression that direct debit requires an initial authorization from the account owner? Otherwise anyone with your bank account number can pull your account funds and bank account numbers are hardly a private information (unlike a cc where you need the card number/expiry/cvv code and generally a correct address)
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.
Are you referring to m-pesa?
the mobile money while convenient r not exactly secure due to MITM.
Yesterday I was renewing my vehicle registration through my US states website. They offered a range of payment options using embedded options on the site. The direct bank account option had the lowest fee but when I tried it I was immediately scared of the security. They used a 3rd party bank account transfer provider that asked me what bank I used and looked like it was going to prompt me for my login info before it errored out and I moved on.
Why can't the US have sane banking standards instead of this mess where you have to agree to a new 3rd party TOS and EULA for every purchase you want to make.
US should have sane transfers soon. The Federal Reserve developed FedNow which is instant bank transfers. It is more secure than ACH since it only does pushes and requests.
It takes time for banks to implement it. There is also conflict with Zelle that some banks developed. I don't think it is meant for buying things, but secure and fast replacement for ACH would be good enough.
What you see is a glued or patchwork to make the things work somehow with the existing state of things. Strictly speaking, a lot of banks do not offer API support and yet these third party tools are able to orchestrate a flow with is nothing less than man-in-the-middle-attack.
The change if it happens at all, across the board to streamline can only from from government mandate. The industry is always going to go for finding some low cost option to achieve the target. The private players are always going to optimize for short term gains.
When using a government website, you were intimidated by the security posture of... Plaid? (Genuine question, maybe this was some other provider but Plaid's aggregator tool is the most common place I see this pop up in real life for ACH)
I personally have _no idea_ what the security posture of plaid is. I know they're a startup and made a bit of noise a few years ago, but if I was trying to buy something and a third party app popped up saying, "hey give me total access to withdraw directly from your bank account for a sec", why on earth would I say yes to that?
It also seems to go against common security advice. "Never log into your back account if redirected by a website you sort of, but don't really trust, except sometimes its alright and it's up to you to tell the difference" is a terrible way to secure banking.
Nowadays Plaid uses OAuth for many banks, but the real problem is and always has been that they get full access to your transaction data and pass it on to their users.
If any site asks me for my bank login credentials, I run far away and start checking if I've made any security mistakes. So far Paypal is the only credentials I'll enter after a redirect.
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.
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.
I can only speak for my countries, but almost all payment terminals now have the option to scan a QR code with your mobile banking app to pay using Wero.
That's good. Maybe I haven't seen it because direct debit via contactless (including Apple Pay) is faster, hence the default, where I am.
> At any rate, I don't see EuroPA or Wero break the 'hegemony' of Visa/MC the way this article claims.
You're right, it does not. But it's a significant step towards that goal. In-store payments are next on the agenda.
As usual if there is reasonable competition this limits what the established actors can and will do.
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.
So you have to use a phone or does it work without one?
Does it handle credit card payments?
The QR code just contains a URL to a website, so you can also just use that link and a web browser. That website will let you choose which bank you use, and then redirect to your bank's website which will use your bank account directly. I don't think it works with cards at all.
Thanks, that sounds pretty good.
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?
If using a phone, yes, but then you probably already did.
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.
Useful reference for banking app compatibility in grapheneOS https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
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.
> 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.
Has nothing to do with the steps
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
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.
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.
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.
> should redirect me to my bank
Eugh. The problem with that is that people don't verify they've actually been sent to their bank. An attacker will set up fake merchant sites, pay for Google ads to get your traffic, then have you log into your bank to pay for things.
The more we normalise this, the quicker people will fall for it.
If they haven't been redirected to their bank, verifying with their mobile banking app using a QR code will not work.
So I have to get out my phone every time I use my credit card on my computer?
Not credit card. Bank account. Webauthn/passkeys could also work for auth as they check the domain and can't be phished
That’s why we don’t pay 3%+ on all transactions
I get 3% cash back, though.
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.
This is actually how it works in India with "e-mandates".
In order to set up a recurring bill the merchant must get a "mandate" from the customer, which involves them approving the amount/frequency/term of the payment. The customer can at any time view a list of open mandates on their bank's web site/app and cancel any they wish. Recurring payments only succeed when the mandate remains valid.
The payment amount may be revised downward without getting a new mandate, but raising it up requires replacing the old mandate with a new one.
In order to make a non-initial charge the merchant must pre-authorize it with the bank a few days prior (handing the ID of mandate under which the charge is made to the bank), and pass the confirmation they get back from the bank when they do the real charge. The bank notifies the customer about the upcoming renewal and its amount.
IMO this is exactly how it should work.
That still works. There are three entities: customer, bank and merchant.
The merchant should never be able to pull from your bank account. However, the merchant can send an invoice for a payment. Either the customer manually pushes the payment, or delegates to the bank that each invoice from merchant X should immediately result in a payment push [1].
The difference from the pull system is that the customer can at any point end this automatic push payment, but in the pull system the customer can only beg the merchant (eg. the gym) to stop charging their account.
[1] Or even better in an ideal world, delegate this pushing to their local finance app. So the bank can't put roadblocks for a customer cancelling a subscription.
> [...] the merchant can send an invoice for a payment. Either the customer manually pushes the payment, or delegates to the bank that each invoice from merchant X should immediately result in a payment push [1].
This already very close to how SEPA direct debits currently operate. I can instruct my bank with one click to stop honoring a given direct debit mandate (they'll then block all further payments under the same mandate reference), request any payment to be reversed for any reason (that I don't have to provide) etc.
The only difference to your suggested model is that the default is to honor all new mandates. I believe nothing – operationally or from a scheme perspective – prevents banks from requiring positive confirmation for every new mandate or even every single direct debit, though, and some banks (but not mine) even support this.
> in the pull system the customer can only beg the merchant (eg. the gym) to stop charging their account.
Not for SEPA direct debits, in any case.
My central problem is that in current pull based systems (both CC and direct debit), the merchant has access to the information to take money from my account. But that information can leak and someone else can take money from my account.
It's insane that digital systems are less secure than cash based system. If a merchant hands me a paper invoice, they can't just take cash out of my wallet.
The merchant should communicate to me where I need to deposit money, and I should put that into my system. The merchant should have little to no information about me.
Something something capability-based finance something something
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.
> Trading a dependency on MasterCard and Visa for one on Google and Apple is at best a sidegrade.
That's really not how it works. You as the user are prompted to pick the bank you want to use, and then your bank prompts you to approve the transaction.
The only scenario I can think of that might involve google or apple is if you want to use Android or iPhone for mobile payments with NFC.
Which part of "confirm the transaction by opening the banking app on your mobile phone." does not depend on a banking app installed on a Google/Apple-controlled environment?
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.
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.
iDEAL is a killer name
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.
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
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).
If I am understanding you correct, isn't this what UPI does already?
Yes. Common among Asian countries. Where authorizing a 3rd party to pull money isn't natural. Among the main reasons Uber failed there.
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.
The physical barcode reader is long gone in Belgium. Instead, you scan the QR code with your banking app (or on mobile, click a link to open the banking app), and either verify directly for amounts under €250 (?), or verify big amounts with ItsMe, another app, using Face ID.
> 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.
I can't talk about Belgium but from what I've read, the dutch iDeal system requires nothing of the sort. It seems to act as a broker between your bank and the business, and a user's input is limited to pick the bank you use and approve the payment through your bank's app.
It used to be the case in the Netherlands with iDeal that you'd use your bank's e.dentifier for two factor auth (a physical device that you'd put your card into to get a code you could then put into the website to verify) - they replaced this with using your banking app sometime over the past 10 years.
When using the web interface some banks still offer the physical reader (which I prefer), but the banks are pushing hard to move to the phone app.
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 is really cool. I would like to see that system in the US given that my bank has IP restrictions for my account. I would also like the ability to pre-approve specific vendors for specific amounts within each bank as a native service all banks should support.
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
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.
> 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?
Providing credit cards online even by phone for 20 years I have never had any issues, or known anyone who had issues. The few occasions my cards were compromised (all my own fault): a restaurant in Vienna pre Covid when cash was king in Europe, I insisted to use the card and the waiter took it inside lol. Got a 4000k cruise booked a few weeks later. Another time at an ATM in Brazil, I even noticed the suspects around the machines waiting and still went for it. A gas station ATM in NYC. That’s about it. Every time I called the bank and they refunded the money. So what I’m saying is security doesn’t seen to be a big issue in the US when it comes to online transactions with credit cards. Of course this is all subjective from my own experiences, but I’m kind of reckless using cards so I’m probably a good test subject.
But most people here don't want credit cards; risk of spending what you don't have just works differently over there outside mortgages. And then this new stuff is just objectively better: debit cards, even though you will get the money back mostly, makes it a hassle as you basically pay the lowest fees possible and never credit so fraud really sucks. And makes no sense; away with those cards; we do not need them anymore.
Individual experience is rarely an accurate representation of the broader system.
try getting a refund for fraudulent card charge in other countries except the US.... most other banks in LATAM/EU will not simply "refund" you the money.
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.
That has nothing to do with Wero, that's just your bank (ING) being stupid.
It works very good and user-friendly, but iDeal had a disadvantage: chargebacks aren't possible. Whether Wero has the same issue, I do not know.
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
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.
Does this work as a credit card system or for debit only?
I thought it was an EU wide version of the belgian PayConiq
That’s how giro payments work. Same for Klarna.
How does the website know which bank to redirect to?
A dropdown is offered and the choice is remembered.
as it was the case in Baltic states since forever. Payments with CC came much later.
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...
Making a note of this as an obvious technical alliance that should have existed for decades.
> 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.
Indeed, it's terrible for fraud, as fraudsters are more likely to land behind bars.
Sure, but nowhere near as easy as filling a dispute on most other payment networks.
> 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.
In reply to .3: bancontact is nearly free per operation, but credit card were percentage heavy fee per transaction... That's why. And don't forget that the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg will prefer debit over credit for payment.
Don't forget that the banking world is still under a lot of pressure from the various government (systemic risk assessment for example) and the stakeholders. It's a mess!
3. Yeah, the previous system we used was just too cheap and efficient. Credit cards are still not common.
4. We're indeed a bit later than elsewhere, but there are many now.
/rant? :-)
1. sounds nice though! But how do they verify that it's actually you? Just matching the photo manually? People are terrible at that. Or do they scan a fingerprint?
> 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.
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!
How mind-numbingly lame. Just another dime a dozen meme.
> > 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.
> SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.
Even more than now there is a QR code format for SEPA Instant Payments. Some invoice have a QR code and when it is scanned with a bank app, the fields for a bank transfer are prefilled. IBAN, amount, etc...
We just need an app to generate this QR code for the amount one wants to request.
Yes, the only difference is that you need to communicate your bank account number and likely your legal name.
Wero doesn't change that as it's just another interface for SEPA instant payments. In its current version, it just adds phone numbers as an alias. Via the phone number you can also find out their full name and, after a transaction, their account number, as long as they've enabled Wero for their account.
> 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.
They made it mandatory in NL not long ago iirc, or at least the validation now is and the bank doesn't let me leave the field blank. It does seem to be okay with variants of the name
I, too, would prefer to just be able to give people a random number to send money to. Isn't that a GDPR requirement anyway: data minimisation? Can they legally require this beyond their 90% of the law (that is, custody of the thing I'm trying to move)?
which... isn't really a problem for legal transfers, is it
Wero and Bizum are built on top of SEPA anyway
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.
Well i am in France, and what I said is factually true for some banks; at least mine (LCL)
While your complaint is valid, no need to separate in chunks, there's a checksum.
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
LOL thank you domain squatters. I can't think of any other reason why startups often always have the most ridiculous names.
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.
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.
Apparently it's the same as the Dutch payment system but in some languages that "iDEAL" had wrong associations.
As terrible as these are, at least they aren't just random short English words.
And at least its not just a random letter in the English language too! (looking at you X)
I hate random English words as company names. The other day I saw a company called Runway and it seemed interesting. Turns out there's quite a few companies called Runway or with a product called Runway, in the same industry.
Same with Bolt.
And I hate that Meta is now the company name so I can't look for meta stuff without also getting results about the company formerly known as Facebook.
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 got some of those from Ikea the other day, decent for the price
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 can feel Galactus's pain.
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
We're appending "AI" now to English words, to match the Anguilla TLD that are fashionable and will never become dated.
- Mike, co-founder of MoistAI
Or adding "-ly" at the end.
"Just use Cashly!" "Download Crditly"
It's bonkers to me that Box and Square are two totally different companies in two totally different industries
Vowels are _so_ 1900s
then add a second r and it's suddenly piracy or torrent related!
Obliteratr
Obltrtr
Ah yes, that hot trend from 2010.
ahahah!
so true. those names are silly. also, French and Spanish can already send money for free via IBAN / SEPA
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...
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.
> write the recipient's IBAN,
You can do it once, and save in in your bank app.
> wait a day for the transfer to take place.
Isn't instant SEPA required to be supported by all banks now?
> You can do it once, and save in in your bank app.
I try not to send or write my IBAN just anywhere. With things like Direct Debit, I treat it with care. Sharp contrast with Paypal, where you can use your email address or even have a paypal.me page that does not expose your email at all.
> Isn't instant SEPA required to be supported by all banks now?
Yes, and yet I think it's not supported by all banks. Especially those that are not in the Euro area. One more thing - many people including me are to this day not informed or aware if instant payments are charged by banks or not. I honestly don't know.
Good point about Direct Debit, thank you.
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.
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.
I got some (bad?) news for you: Most Americans are either in complete denial over this or genuinely don't care. They don't think the wealth and lifestyles they enjoy have anything to do with the US' status as a global hegemon. Some even think the relationship is inverted, believing that as the world de-Americanizes, Americans will somehow benefit from this.
> Some even think the relationship is inverted, believing that as the world de-Americanizes, Americans will somehow benefit from this.
That may well be true of the working class, who receive nothing from the foreign income multinational corporations earn but face more competition to buy housing from the people who do receive a share, and more competition for jobs from foreigners (both immigration and globalization).
The people who hold these views are overwhelmingly not members of the working class. They're retirees or Gen-Xers coming off their peak earning years.
> They don't think the wealth and lifestyles they enjoy have anything to do with the US' status as a global hegemon.
> The people who hold these views are overwhelmingly not members of the working class. They're retirees or Gen-Xers coming off their peak earning years.
That implies young working class people think their lives would be worse if America does not remain a global hegemon.
I'd love to see your sources for that claim. That is not my impression. I have seen little if any support for American hegemony among the young.
Another American here, I find these self loathing kind of posts to be so sophomoric and embarrassing
It is entirely possible to recognize the things that are good about the US while also seeing the very terrible things. Nothing is perfect and if we tell ourselves it is by criticizing anyone who says otherwise, we are robbing not only the world but ourselves of any opportunity to make it better.
No sophomoric and embarrassing is electing the same unqualified rapist pedophile moron back into power again.
All I see on your timeline regarding us is blind sycophantic behavior. It's not self-loathing or sophomoric to recognize a point of policy or behavior that is not conducive to the wellbeing of global markets and wider well-being. We haven't been behaving in the best interest of the common good, or fellow Americans, nor even private interest for decades now and a little realization of that is just seeing objective reality.
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 maxima 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...
I question your sources methodology as, similar to travel habits during the performative COVID border lockdown, Canadians are still heading south en masse over the winter.
Okay that got a hearty laugh. I post a CBC article and you question it, then make a claim while offering no evidence at all.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to find that you're just here as an instigator, possibly not even from North America. Or, maybe I just want to hope that it's malice rather than incompetence that governs your behaviour.
You are probably thinking of local maxima.
Thanks. I probably am. I will never not confuse the two because I imagine getting into a comfortable place and then having to march up the next hill to discover an even comfier place that you can't see from where you are. I also imagine the instability of placing a boulder at the top of a hill and the effort of pushing it up a hill to find a new resting spot.
I'm sure I can invert the sign of something being measured to make my mental model work again :D
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.
So is Wero going to give everyone in the world a say over its regulations or will it be a busted, provincial, EU-only concern?
Or maybe they'll have it in the great independent territory of Greenland as well.
It is LITERALLY an EU-only system. What is your tired point?
> We do not have a say over a nuclear-armed idiocracy forcing it's profound corruption and stupidity on other sovereign entities.
That’s funny because it perfectly defines the relationship between the EU and the countries in it.
So now that 8 years have passed since that article was written, do you have any idea how many Canadians have been banned from the US for life because they used marijuana in the past?
> credit card data can be stored in the United States, where it’s an open book to U.S. authorities, who don’t need a warrant to access it if it belongs to non-Americans
> A U.S. border guard could quickly put a Canadian in an impossible position — admit to marijuana use and be banned for that, or deny it and be banned for lying
The mechanism in the article is border agents analyzing your credit card purchases to see if you've bought legal weed. Has this become a common procedure? I've passed the border 50+ times in the last few years, I haven't yet had it happen to me. I've never had them bring up cannabis once, they've always seemed much more concerned about when I was leaving.
I think when it comes to something as important as border operations, it doesn't really add much to the conversation to share fear-mongering pieces from 8 years ago.
This is a _very_ fair criticism and worth pointing out. I thought the piece wasn't particularly alarming and more just showing the opportunity exists, and cursory googles don't show any cases where it happened.
The problem I'm trying to point to is that we cooperate internationally because it benefits both countries or pushes towards a common goal- but when one of the cooperative speaks of turning that cooperation into a weapon, to me, makes it clear that the goal of the cooperation has changed.
It was threatened and just because Canada called what turned out to be a bluff, doesn't make that threat magically go away. Next time, is it a bluff or threat the USA will follow through on? We shouldn't be in this position in the first place.
what until you understand what is next, cdbc and restricted digital money. Enjoy it.
Like American DUIs?
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.
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.
> 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.
In France it's pronounced "uh row"
interestingly, french speakers just have to pronounce "wero" as "nouro" for the same pun to work ("eux-ro" vs "nous-ro")
How does France pronounce it?
wéro (é like elephant)
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
I hear it pronounced "Wéro"
Like Ouais-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!
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.
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.
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.
The article mentions P2P is coming first. It’s also in French, so I’m relying on translation…
Sort of a success - people in the UK still ask for me for my account number and sort code.
We already have SEPA payments in the EU. The path has been paved.
We already have instant SEPA payments and most countries already have a version of this running, I think the idea is that this unifies it across europe. I can send money to any friend in 20 seconds with Bizum in Spain and a lot of merchants also accept Bizum.
I think the headline is misleading to the point of being childish.
It describes a consolidation of _online_ payment systems that are currently quite fragmented in the EU. It does nothing about in-store payments. Direct debit cards (10x as popular as credit cards in the EU) are often still MC/Visa powered, and the fastest way to pay contactless (even if that is via Apple Pay).
Online and in-store payments will follow in 2027, as per the article
Understood. But even then it couldn't be easier than the contactless direct debit we already have.
will depend on how it's implemented, you could end up paying via a QR code, contact less NFC, a phone number, the web. I think it could open up a lot of innovation
It could be cheaper though and it also reduces the reliance on an untrustworthy former ally.
The payer couldn't care less about how much the store pays for the transaction. He or she just wants to tap with their phone, and the default here are Visa/MC cards. In addition to the transaction price not being an argument for the payer, Wero also afaik does not have as much consumer protection as (certainly some) credit cards offer. I also bet the average person doesn't understand or care about the whole political dispute either. Again, they just want to pay easily and safely.
I don't think Wero can "win" this from just the merchants side. It's got to be better for the customer's side.
The merchant could offer a discount for using it.
I agree this could be a difficult battle and we effectively need some alternative to existing card issuers if they are to be displaced.
Current contactless payments are easy, secure and allow disputes etc.
"Hey buddy, I give you a tiny tiny discount if you pay without fraud protection..."
I mean, some places do that. But for the consumer there is no advantage. It's probably fine at cafés, restaurants and such. But why would you as a consumer want it for any more important purchase? As you mention.
“balkanized” is offensive term
I wasn't aware. It's meant to refer to every country having a different solution for the same thing, which in the EU is much the case.
That said I picked it up from Steve Jobs talking about cable networks in the US.
That conveniently ignores the part where it refers to a fracturing where every part is hostile towards each other and unwilling to cooperate on anything. It's not a neutral term, it really is a rather offensive term for everyone from the Balkan today.
It's a historical reference to the events that led to World War 1.
Understood, I will happily edit it out
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.
Wero uses AWS for their infrastructure... So much about their sovereignty focus.
Source(German): https://netzpolitik.org/2026/uneingeloestes-versprechen-auf-...
Being n% more sovereign is better than not at all. It’s not that hard to switch providers down the road, it’s not the gotcha that some people think that is.
... for now
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.
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.
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.
That's just the easiest way to sell it to the Dutch public probably.
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...
I don't think it is. If you want people to move, you need to give them something. And SEPA but with phone numbers isn't it. At least not for me. Especially if it means that I am dependent on whether my bank implemented it.
I have recently seen people surprised when they sent a Wero transaction and the other party could see their IBAN.
You still didn't clarify: what PayPal features make you think that way?
I don't personally know anyone who uses PayPal, the only times I used it was for transferring money using F&F to purchase 2nd hand music gear.
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.
Isn't that much better than PayPal? Why would i want my money to end up in some intermediate PayPal account?
PayPal isn't without flaws but I think buyer protections and the obfuscation of the banking info are genuine features for people. I would like a real competitor to PayPal in Europe. Maybe even something that is not from a private company.
What I fear is that people will try Wero, see that it's not what they wanted and then never go back. But maybe I'm wrong.
> 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.
> Buyer protection
Wero does introduce some sort of chargebacks and disputes, buy from reputable sellers and otherwise you are still free to use paypal for additional protection (but don't send money as "Friends & Family").
> Obfuscation of my banking data (IBAN)
IBAN is public facing and it is not a problem to share. It is the identifier of your account therefore required to make transfers. Money can't be charged with your IBAN. With paypal you share your e-mail.
> Having access to it with my bank
Your bank is the one that is providing the access to the Wero service, it will pull from or deposit into your bank account.
> Not needing to share my contact list
I don't see how this is required.
The strength of Wero is that it will be a unified friction less way of making digital transfers. It finds a similar place in the market that in the USA is filled by Venmo or Cash app however if you have a bank account you can use it.
I think it speaks volumes that no one within the Netherlands uses Paypal, but iDeal is the de-facto standard for all online payments there.
> Your bank is the one that is providing the access to the Wero service, it will pull from or deposit into your bank account.
I mean my bank is not available in Wero. And A lot of other banks are the same. PayPal or Klarna just works.
> IBAN is public facing and it is not a problem to share. It is the identifier of your account therefore required to make transfers. Money can't be charged with your IBAN. With paypal you share your e-mail.
I know but a lot of people don't see it that way. Not me. But I know they are.
> Not needing to share my contact list
AFAIK you need to sync your contacts to them to send a person money. I am not sure though because I don't have access.
Please don't misunderstand me. I want something like Wero in Europe. I just hope that it's not the wrong thing and people will be disappointed and less likely to try something new.
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.
Tell that to my bank. I am a software developer. I could probably do it. But I don't work there.
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 also decouples merchants from POS systems, so it's massively more flexible and step forward if people want to do stuff and get paid. Contactless payment is faster, but PRC also rolling out palm to pay which is much faster/convenient vs tap. IMO optimal coverage is probably QR codes and skipping tapping straight for palm scanning.
I don't think it's as big of an issue. China seems to be doing just fine when it comes to payment processing, and it's not the only country that works that way.
From a software freedom perspective, I actually prefer QR codes. The UX of tapping a card is a little better (though it also opens up an avenue for theft) but I think every phone I've held the past ten years has had some way to quickly scan a QR code from the lock screen, even if not every phone made the possibility obvious.
Yes. Physical cards are probably going away or becoming unusual in the medium term. A "credit card" or "debit card" will still exist, but not usually as a physical piece of plastic.
Instead of tapping or swiping the card, you tap the phone or watch, or scan a QR on your phone and then confirm in the bank app. Both ways seem to have similar useability to me, and an equivalent result. I've done both in different countries, and neither really bothered me. Yes, the tap method has higher potential for petty theft.
But why would we want to take a step back when we have contactless right now? This makes little sense... It is worse UX and does not work (I think) for quick things like taking the bus or underground.
Again, China has what is has because people had phones but no payment cards, and they don't have "software freedom" either (whatever that means): They are fully bound to the two providers (Alipay and WeChat) which provide accounts to a point now that is much worse that my dependency or Visa or Mastercard here in Europe because most places now do not accept anything else.
What would make sense is for the likes of Wero to find a way to support contactless so people can just tap exactly as they do now. As said by another commenter, this does not require a physical card (and already exists with Apple Pay and Google Pay). Frankly, Wero is a solution looking for a problem at this point in time...
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.
I guess the point is: Why would you bother with QR codes if you have contactless?
I still don't think contactless works across the internet.
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.
As far as different payment systems go I think gnu taler is the most compelling. If keeps the payer anonymous while letting the government know how much the payee received for tax purposes.
https://www.taler.net/en/index.html
Somewhat tangential: With advent of LLMs that are very good at translating European languages into English, I think it is great that people are submitting non-English content. I support it 100%. I hope that we see more of it. It will help to expand our "HN Universe" to include more languages and content.
Firefox's local-only (as in not remote-hosted) translation also does a remarkable job here.
(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 already an issue for tourists in many countries that have their own payment system (e.g. Brazil, India, Singapore, Thailand). In some of them you have companies that came up with products for tourists that allow them to pay but they usually come with fees. From what I know the majority of tourists in these countries just travel with cash.
anecdotally, a lot of argentina's apps that have a similar system "had" to develop an interop with brazil's PIX as a feature, ideally an endgame would be for these systems (wero, pix, other countries') to all standardize and integrate each other. would love something like that.
I had that issue in India and it was definitely annoying.
I've never had a problem paying with cards in Singapore or Thailand, although it's been a few years since I've been to Thailand.
Those merchants will move to supporting more networks.
It's the same situation as Diners or Amex, they're supported wherever the merchant felt it made sense to go the extra mile. Touristic places typically pay attention to that.
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.
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.
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.
> The EuroPA alliance, which has already connected Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Andorra since March 2025, serves as a prototype. Six million euros have passed through it in one year, without any particular promotional campaign.
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?
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.
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.
European tech is often atrocious. Every single digital government program in France has been hacked, every social security number is out there, physical addresses tied to crypto wallets, etc.
It's very easy to understand: Paying by credit or debit card is incredibly easy and convenient for customers, and transactions have been instant for a long time, thanks to great technical infrastructure. While bank transfers still take days in some cases.
Most importantly: These cards give customers fraud protection, which is in many cases essential when making online purchases or when traveling. Which leads to more sales for sellers as well, when that worry is removed from the shoulders of customers.
Amex is not very popular in Europe. Discover... I am not sure, not that much.
Visa and MasterCard are everywhere though
Based on my recent experience, Discover is spotty in Europe but some places definitely accept it. Not that great if you're on vacation and want to avoid hassle, though. Discover is my main driver (both credit and bank) in the US, but I decided to use a Visa card in Europe just to avoid random rejections. But you won't be screwed in western Europe if all you have is a Discover card.
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.
The market for these kind of apps in Europe is very divided (just in the Nordics you have Swish, MobilePay and Vipps) but the dent in MC/Visas dominance is significant today. In 2 years, Klarna, Swish and Vipps will be more common both in e-commerce and POS that MC/Visa.
Do we need a pan-EU standard? I'm actually not so sure, but yes it would be nice when traveling.
I think it is a good initiative and a needed step in EU integration. I do think it is remarkable to frame this as a move towards more sovereignty. More EU integration has traditionally always been framed as giving up sovereignty by the member states. Now it is the other way around - thanks to the United States.
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.
If it's p2p transfers why not just use SEPA instant transfers? As for online payments and POS payments, I don't even remember the last time I used a physical card. It's always been Apple pay and I really don't care which card is being used by Apple Pay
A Wero payment is executed as a SEPA transfer. As an online store you don't want to ask customers to manually input a payment reference into a SEPA transfer. It's all about ease of use (and safety).
> As an online store you don't want to ask customers to manually input a payment reference into a SEPA transfer. It's all about ease of use (and safety).
How? With a SEPA transfer I can actually see who I'm paying. With a CC or equivalent it's a lottery.
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
> installments, card on file and other typical services
These are typically cherished by the issuers and not really wanted/needed by the customer. Card installments in particular are the bane of our society IMHO and straight loans replace them properly.
Many banks in EU already had loan systems integrated to deal with oversized purchases and extraordinary months, so getting it out of the network doesn't remove the service to the customer in most cases.
We're kinda seeing this playing out with alternative payment systems in Asia for instance: they provide way less options, yet get very popular.because people just don't miss the extra stuff.
(throwaway alt because main is traceable)
epi acquired idealo (in the Netherlands, and payconiq in Belgium/Luxembourg), slapped the wero brand on it, and announced proudly they have x million customers.
wero as a brand has close to 0 market recognition, and with idealo and payconiq they butchered some of the systems (in the name of consolidation) so badly that incidents have become the norm (and security wise ...yikes!).
Worth mentioning that epi is just the latest attempt at a pan-European payment system, the previous attempts, the Monnet project and PEPSI, failed miserably after wasting billions (tens of billions?) and ...it doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
I wish we could replace visa/mastercard but epi is absolutely not the solution, imho.
> epi is absolutely not the solution, imho.
pray tell, why? why is X not a solution and Stripe is haha
won't someone please think of Stripe common holders!
We've lost so much American soft power for no discernible benefit whatsoever.
When you release a bull in a china shop all you end up with is a lot of broken china, extensive cleanup work, and a steep bill.
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.
Even if Visa/MC keep the fee on foreign spending, losing domestic spending will be a massive financial loss for them (and big gain for EU markets).
Trump sanctions against ICC members and at least one human rights rapporteur has effectively debanked these people and made it very difficult for them to travel.
Protecting Rule of International Law against Rule of Trump Ukazi has become necessary.
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.
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.
Wero started as Paylib [0], a French banks grouping used to provide phone number based payments between banks (and some banks also use it to provide NFC payments on android, instead of Google Wallet).
And also, Wero (unlike something like PayPal), is integrated in your bank's app, for (almost) all participating banks
[0] (Warning: French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paylib
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.
I don't see a way it wouldn't be offered in addition to. Some EU countries (e.g. Denmark) already do something similar where we a national debit card called "DanKort" (mashup of "Danmark" and "Kort" which translates to "Denmark" and "Card"). It typically also has a VISA part to it for usage abroad.
All stores accept this as well as VISA/Mastercard since they want to maximize who they can get money for, so it's already a common place practice for payment terminals to do this. Tourism alone is enough of a reason you would accept VISA/Mastercard still.
> I don't see a way it wouldn't be offered in addition to.
Yes, it will for most nation wide chains, touristic places, and anywhere that has comfortable margins.
For smaller shops and tighter business models, dropping the costlier networks will be the first thing they do. Same way a decent number of shops won't accept Amex, or just no card at all.
Now if we're is cheap and popular enough, there might be more stores getting rid of cash as a reaction.
We’re seeing the opposite in the US where smaller shops aren’t taking cash, presumably so they don’t have to deal with managing it. There is a cost, but I’m sure every business has already priced goods accordingly to pass those fees onto the consumer.
> 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.
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.
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.
Thank you Trump - I guess?! It's great for Europe to wake up and for pointing out we need to decouple from the US and become more tech independent. It's bad enough that the whole world is financing the debt of the USA and every person therein. I hope, that in the long run, our democratic values and freedom will become more and more attractive. Especially when all other players become autocratic regimes. That is, if we realize this freedom is not a given and we are willing to put in the work.
In Austria I'm always in the situation that shops and restaurants are unhappy that I pay by card because they claim that even a direct debit card cost them some large percentage through the terminal provider.
Will these new systems remove the middle man skimming that MasterCard/Visa has been doing to small businesses?
If they really thought this was valueless skimming, why wouldn’t they just refuse to take these cards?
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.
> Apple does not provide any card emulation NFC access to the Apple Watch, for example, and only limited access to iPhones
It would be nice if we weren't also locked into American tech but that's a whole other ballgame.
Free the nipple! Will it be the alternative to visa/mastercard dictating only puritanical usage of their payment systems?
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.
The nasty element of that reward situation, and why I am deeply in favour of the European choice here, is that while some people get nice rewards, some people just pay much higher prices and don't get rewards. So this actually worsens the divide between rich and poor to an extent, and that's just bad policy.
> 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.
This is where American and European mindsets differ vastly.
We spend what we have. Our spending is directly reflected in one’s balance. We’re insensitive to rewards for spending money.
This is spot on. I consider myself an outlier, but only since not long ago. I’ve been using a credit card for everything but only because it gets me points I can exchange for miles on some airlines or exchange for gift cards.
I wish the “old school” banks here were more competitive in this regard.
Wero uses your existing debit account, it's not a separate account.
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.
Idk n26 still not integrated. Twint in Switzerland has amazing penetration can pay at any terminal with qr code
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 think this is misleading as a few other folks say -- otherwise you'd expect Visa/Mastercard stock to drop dramatically at losing that many folks in a single announcement.
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.
> Assuming by "grown-ups" you mean Team Blue
I am deeply, profoundly, emphatically uninterested in your "teams". Your local news are not relevant to us. What the rest of the world sees is US foreign policy, and the mainstream sentiment in every other Western nation right now is one of second-hand embarrassment.
Also the ethnic cleansing does not look great.
OK Doomer.
Does that thought-terminating cliche still work on people?
This is DonHopkins we're talking about. Just be glad it was one line, as opposed to a lengthy off-topic screed relitigating online arguments from 40 years ago, complete with a mention of how he invented pizza menus.
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.
> 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.
Is it? Am I? As a former Sanders caucuser who didn't fall for his supporters' both sides bullshit, perhaps some self-reflection on why running a candidate who's only popular with white people in Iowa would inevitably lose is in order.
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.
Thinking there’s no such thing as ethical capitalism is laughable. Your purity test is counter productive and ultimately just doomer signaling. Sure I get it billionaires are fuckkng us over but that has more to do with the failure of US democracy than capitalism.
he's not actually a member of the party.
They let him run in their party primaries, rather than him being a democrat.
with that context its more sensible that the party brass wasnt particularly pro-bernie. they did their job by letting him run at all
I caucused for Sanders 2016 in Iowa. He lost the primary fair and square, and was mathematically eliminated before superdelegates even factored into the contest at all. Sanders had zero appeal outside of white, college-educated people like myself, whereas Clinton was very popular with minorities and white, college-educated people. She was just a better candidate for the Democrat primary, and if you want to win the general as a Dem, you have to win the primary first.
Blaming the media, capitalism, Debbie whatshername and insider elites is just Bernie Bro conspiracy theory making excuses for a bad, unpopular candidate.
> late stage capitalism
This is not a coherent concept, it's a term that doomers use to blame all of their bugbears with western society on shadowy cabals of nebulous elites. Ethical capitalism is, in fact, real – Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich and Teddy Roosevelt are all examples.
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.
>America: NOT LIKE THAT!!!
Can you post a source supporting this?
The USA is upset about Brazil providing Pix, their local equivalent.
https://restofworld.org/2025/pix-brazil-us-investigation-dig...
What a ridiculous strawman. A huge chunk of Americans are also calling for the end of the Visa/MasterCard duopoly and would love to jump on board to this.
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 has been dealing with wars since before your country existed. That’s nothing new around here.
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.
Wero is for internet payments, but Visa and Mastercard are still involved for card payments. I just got a new-style Dutch debit card and it has a Mastercard logo on it; Visa cards are also still being given out.
The idea is that merchants will ditch the card-pos in the long run. You scan a QR-code or send money through some app. Satispay does that in Italy and got massive rollout from stores because fees were pretty low also for smaller transfers, so no more "sorry, at least 5 euros to pay with card"
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...
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).
So why is this article talking about Visa and Mastercard?
These are two different use cases. I do not think anyone in their right mind is using Zelle to send money to a party they do not fully trust.
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.
I'll be happy when we get credit cards without a visa or mastercard logo
We're entering an era of "tech nationalism". China has been completely vindicated for esssentially not allowing their country and economy to be held hostage to foreign tech companies. It would be an era of "tech colonialism". Look into the century of humiliation, gunboat diplomacy, the opium wars, etc and see why China might not be on board for that.
Europe collectively is a US vassal state, not just in tech. As an example, if someone in Switzerland Venmos someone in the Netherland with a description of "Cuba" or even "Cuban" (sandwich), the payment could be delayed or you could be banned entirely [1]. Why should a payment between two Europeans in Europe be entangled with US sanctions?
The danger here for European "tech emancipation" is that the US government will get involved and fight the fights for US companies. The United Fruit Company was the poster child for this where the US deposed the Guatemalan government in 1954 and the 60+ years of Cuban sanctions are basically because the UFC was cheating on Cuban taxes.
Brazil's Pix (IMHO) will come under the pressure of this on behalf of Visa/Mastercard that may include trade retaliation and other forms of pressure and the US government will argue that Pix is "illegally" subsidized by the government. Europe's payment systems will face the same attacks.
[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/matthewzeitlin/be-caref...
The ship has already sailed and the US is simply refusing to recognize it. Yes, in the short term there will be tantrums thrown and threats made, but it won't prevent the middle powers from diversifying away from the US.
And then Apple pay and Google pay are not going to implement it, and nobody is going to use it.
Thankfully the EU is not against forcing these monopolies to support open markets.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?)
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.
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, the merchant website runs a spinner for like 10 seconds while it confirms it in the background, and then you get a confirmation of your purchase with an order number.
In Portugal there's often a "MB Way" payment option - which AFAICT is the PT version of these other systems.
With a code. https://www.blik.com/en/first-steps-with-blik
Source was posted back in February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861789
How does it compare to digital euro plan?
Digital euro has plans to be "cash-like" and have "private, offline payments", Wero is not aiming in this direction
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.
For hackers, Monero is the perfect digital payment system.
On paper, in practice it's delisted (At least in EU) from most exchanges like Kraken which makes it an extra hassle to get.
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.
Also what problems did it solve that we actually have? Without that, there's no incentive for change.
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.
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.)
How does it compare to the digital euro, isn't it better?
Good! Now please remove dependency of alphabet + apple for bank apps, and we're golden.
The UPI payment system in India seems to work really well. I'm not sure about the architecture exactly, but there seems to be a way to generate one-time passwords that you can use to pay people a fixed amount. E.g. you go to a website or store, and they display a QR code for payment, which contains the payment recipient information and amount of the charge. When you scan it, you are taken to your bank app where you authorize the recipeint and the amount, then you are given a special code in the form of a QR code or alphanumeric code. The person recieving the payment can scan the code to recieve payment ... or if you are online you can paste the alphanumeric code. No other information is exchanged. There's nothing that can compromise your ID or account info.
Pretty amazing!
Insane that a developing country has something so seemless, and meanwhile in the USA my credit card number is stolen online every 3 to 5 years, necessitating cancellations and in some cases (as with Chase) I had to close the entire account as they could not stop the fraud even after issuing 5 new cards over the space of 6 months--somehow the new card authorizations were being ported automatically into some subscription systems.
India had to get rid of cash and move virtually all transactions online to deal with the massive fake currency problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH4TTuW_JcA
Oh, it is monthly paid Wero ad.
Yeah, thanks no thanks.
Wero is owned by the banks from worst EU countries - Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands.
In my country, we call them New Middle East.
Yeah, no way I would support this in my business.
They will ban you for things they don't "like" in their countries.
Like free speech, gun manufacturing and exporting to Ukraine.
Being anti illegal immigrants etc.
(legal immigrants are great, like Ukranians, Belarusians, even Russians if they burn their passport, haha)
> Like free speech, gun manufacturing and exporting to Ukraine.
"Free-speech' discussions aside, they're banning you from "manufacturing" and "exporting" TO Ukraine? This war is becoming very complicated.
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.
This explains why they were in China pushing for them to open up the market to them. They're nearly bleeding all of Europe.
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.
Norway passed a law quite recently forbidding permanent card only shops, cafes, etc. As far as I can tell this was done for two reasons, firstly card only is discriminatory and secondly to improve the countries resilience in the face of cyber attacks.
You can only be electronic payments only if you are a temporary sales location such as a flea market, ice cream van, etc.
Oh, interesting! I read https://www.newsinenglish.no/2024/10/01/cash-cleared-for-a-c... and https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norway-strengthens-right-to-pay... .
The point of budgeting via "cash stuffing" instead of the invisible shuffling of money through a bank card, is something that in retrospect is something similar to what I did when I was younger - the cash in my wallet is getting low, so I should hold back on expenditures.
It lists some issues, like "The number of automated teller machines (called a minibank in Norwegian) has also declined, and most of them recently started charging a fee of NOK 10 (USD 1) to withdraw cash. If more people start using cash again, that may change."
Can you perhaps tell me how things have changed in the last couple of years?
The report of my demise was greatly exaggerated.
I see 10 people in my address book that I could theoretically send money via Wero. Hundreds of people in my address book have a Visa or a MasterCard. It's not a bad thing to have competition and ambition, but to say goodbye is premature to say the least. Online payments especially between regular people (so not businesses) are still dominated by PayPal. And even online shopping is dominated by PayPal although Apple and Google Pay are taking a bigger slice because it's just so convenient. And they're just again using Visa and MasterCard.
I'm not sure Wero was developed to be very practical. I registered with my phone number, but now have second thoughts because I don't want to give my phone number to strangers when buying on second hand marketplaces. But guess what - you cannot change it. You cannot register a second number. It just feels very rigid in its design.
There were other systems already that were supposed to do the same. Girocard/EC... All dead and buried now.
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.
Is there an english version of this?
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`"
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.
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
Similar to PayU.
https://czech.payu.com/en/
It's only available in 3 countries in EU. Great. But classic slowness of EU, it should be in whole EU yesterday. With manadatory Euro.
Aaaaaahahahahahahaha, sure they are. Sure.
Please post in English. Chrome is unable to translate this page.
Good. Now the same has to happen for the software industry.
Unfortunately EU officials also can not be trusted. They are indeed weak. So we all know in the long run, the USA always gets favourable deals and Europans are kept as proxy-payers here. Germany in particular has a very unhealthy love affair going with the USA; to some extent this is understandable due to an export-centric industry, but now there is a recession and Germany still thinks it'll go away soon, "just don't change anything". Timid rabbits, with Merz being the uber-rabbit that just does nothing useful on his own. Other than risking being a loudmouth before he was elected - and now germans are very unhappy with his performance.
This is good for the world given the situation in the USA today. The folks in the US who voted for this will never understand how badly they fucked up.
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.
Adblockers solve this.
Crypto broskis have been selling so many bullshit coins for this specific moment in time and failed.
"sovereign" :D :D :D
In the EUSSR1
I thought crypto would have solved this ;-)
To be fair, crypto is anti-consumer.