Wero is such a valuable asset for Europe and couldn't have come at a better time.
It's built on the excellent SEPA system, which standardized bank transfers and "Lastschrift" in Europe. SEPA itself got a huge upgrade last year with mandatory instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers between European checking accounts.
Both of those allowed Wero to happen as a final abstract top layer, meaning: the UX of sending money to an email address with the security and convenience of bank transfers. And everything is built collaboratively on top of European banking infrastructure.
No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
And before some says: "Well, now the government controls everything!": They already did, since... Ever. Now its one less entity with that access and one that can be (hopefully) controlled and changed by a majority.
Note that Wero is amongs others based on the Dutch iDEAL [1] system, which was introduced 21 years ago. Virtually every Dutch web shop supports iDEAL (and many only support iDEAL) as well as international payment services such as PayPal and Stripe. As a result, the vast majority of transactions of Dutch webshops go through iDEAL. It is really a super-nice frictionless system.
iDEAL also supports P2P payments through Tikkie (ABN AMRO) or the payment request option of other banks. You basically show a QR code or send a link and the person paying goes through the iDEAL flow to transfer the money. Tikkie (and the other bank's similar and compatible systems) have been one of the primary methods for P2P transfers for many years now.
I am really happy that we are getting the same system across multiple countries now. Contactless payments through Wero are also planned, so that we can finally become independent of Google/Apple Pay for contactless payments using a phone.
[1] EPI purchased the Dutch iDEAL and Belgian Payconiq and mentioned on multiple occasions that Wero is based on the foundations of iDEAL. They kept iDEAL running as a separate system in order not to disturb it during the upbringing of Wero, but iDeal is going to migrated to Wero the coming period.
Not really. They just changed the logo to make people get used to the name. The next phase where they start migrating the iDEAL infra into Wero starts in October:
Wero’s goal is to become a European payment system. Like an iDEAL across EU countries. That requires buy-in from major EU banks, some of which are shareholders of EPI, the company behind Wero.
It’s also a response to the ECB’s digital Euro, a way that banks show the central bank “hey, we the banks are actually capable of creating a good EU-level payment system”.
The commenter is stating that as a fact, which is spreading information that's not true to others reading that.
Perfect is the enemy of good as always. Having a system that is currently available on the two biggest mobile platforms for the launch (Covering probably 99.9% of consumers) is already much better than piping every single transaction through two US mega corps.
The European Payments Initiative (EPI) acquired the Dutch payment system iDEAL with the aim of making it the standard payment solution across all European countries. [...] The first step is to make iDEAL the standard in France and Germany because the countries don’t yet have a standard payment system for e-commerce, according to AD. Customers in the Netherlands will notice little of this.
> instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers
Interesting, I didn't know that. Now, why would anyone want to do a non-instant transfer, then (short of not knowing about it like in my case)? Doesn't this mandate basically make all transfers instant?
A lot of banks won’t even give you the option of a non-instant transfer now, at least here in Portugal. Though non-instant transfers can in theory be recalled since there is some time before the money gets to the destination account, my bank even gives a warning now when doing a transfer to ensure I have the details right because they can not recall a transaction after the money arrives.
They are allowed to set caps, I've seen them down to around €5000 per transaction so it's not literally all transfers. Still free to transfer above, just takes more than a few seconds to do so, presumably for fraud/theft protection. Some banks will make that a daily limit, or configurable, there's some flexibility but they're mandated to justify all limits with no arbitrary discrimination against instant transfers.
In practice, obviously most personal payments are well under that margin, so within-EU bank transfers are defacto instant everywhere. Most banking apps I've seen don't even show an 'instant/slow' option any more, it's just all instant.
> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
Officially you need a Google or Apple account to download a wero capable app from their stores, and Google and Apple can always delete all wero capable apps from their stores like for example with Russian sanctioned banks.
Some banking apps work on non - google play controlled android smartphones, but always only accidentally. Some banks like for example Consorbank already crack down on "sideloading" their app at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/Consorsbank/comments/1p909w1/commen...
If Wero is going to be similar to iDEAL, which it is based on, the payment flow will be through your bank's app. Heck, even the Wero app description says so:
The Wero app is available only for account holders from the German bank Postbank and the French bank La Banque Postale.
Are you a customer of another Wero-enabled bank? If so, you can easily use Wero within your banking app.
I have seen quite some people downloading their banking apps through the Aurora store (admittedly, it's a frontend for the Play Store, but you don't need an account or the app). Or you can use something like APKMirror and verify that they have the correct signing keys.
Of course, if they need Play Services or Play Integrity basic, then you need sandboxed Google Play or microG. If your bank does remote attestation through Play Integrity, then it is game over, but it is worth contacting your bank. E.g. some banks have added the GrapheneOS signing keys and added support for AOSP remote attestation.
I can pay with iDEAL without interacting with a smartphone, using only my laptop and a physical 2FA device provided by my bank. Do you know if this will be possible with Wero?
It's up to your bank actually. Banks (generally) don't want to pay for your hardware key so you need to do a special dance to trigger their compliance bound neural pathways to send you one.
But then the true bliss will arrive the next year with eidas 3.0 or whatever it is called
Require payment services providers to ensure that all users can benefit from methods to perform SCA which are adapted to their needs and situations and, in particular, that those methods do not depend on one single technology, device or mechanism, for instance on the possession of a smartphone.
It’s fine to decouple from US payment and financial infra today and punt on decoupling from US big tech in the future. These changes take time and effort at scale, so it’s about being directionally accurate, not doing all the changes all at once. “You eat an elephant one bite at a time.” Europe is eating the financial infra bites right now. There are other bites to be taken over the next several years.
Similar to Airbus moving critical apps from AWS to France’s Scaleway. Flexing the muscle needed to do the rest, and starting with the most important.
I recently bought something from fahrrad.de and was surprised to see Wero as an payment option. I don't know what I expected, but scanning the QR code and acknowledging the payment in my banking app worked without any issues.
The whole process had a very "snappy" feeling without waiting for any of the usual spinners and redirects. So... thumbs up, I guess?
I need to use this thread to mention the Polish payment system Blik. It is one of the most convenient payment systems out there - you generate an ephemeral 6-digit code in your banking app, copy it to the vendor, confirm, done. Works P2P with phone numbers, too.
Interestingly, it would be the perfect system for payments using AI agents - the agent tries to pay, asks user to provide 6-digit code, submits payment request. User confirms via banking app. Done.
There is also a Blik feature to pay in one click - merchant remembers your payment and allows making subsequent payment without code, just by confirming transaction via banking app.
There's an interesting angle to BLIK vs Wero. While I believe QR codes are more convenient it is actually possible to give BLIK over the phone. Which means that youngsters (or fraudsters ;)) have access to their guardians' money over the phone line.
Wero shows that marketing is everything. It's just regular bank transactions with a much larger fee. We could have had EPC QR codes and similar completely free technologies instead.
Usually the fee is on merchant (and it's few % depending on region regulations etc.)
Payment providers such as Wero are doing direct bank transfer, which is usually fee-less, but then they can afford to put a on-merchant fee that's much lower than what credit card companies are charging.
Thus the model is win-win-win: Consumer doesn't pay more, Merchant pays less, and Wero gets their share.
Free for individuals, but paid if you're the business it seems from what I've found? If that's the case, it seems to be the same as a card in the US and I wouldn't be surprised if some businesses try to pass it on like they do with cards.
Pix is Brazil is also paid by the merchants. ~0.33%.
Individuals is completely free. You can transfer even to people without bank accounts (and withdraw on places like corner shops and authorized merchants).
For companies certain transfers are free.
eg: my company pays nothing, since I'm not a merchant, one of the banks tried to charge once and I just changed to another that offered 0% in return for keeping investments there.
Some banks offer extra services like POS machines with instant confirmation and so on (so the POS employee don't need access to the company bank account).
I mean, that was always possible and many offered that. Wero offers the PayPal style integrated flow, QR code scanning from your banking app is slightly higher friction
God I wish the US had a digital payment system that we could all basically agree on. Having Apple Pay vs Google Pay vs Zelle vs Paypal vs Venmo vs all the others is annoying as hell.
The first time I read "US store X supports Apple Pay or Google Pay now" I was really confused. I didn't know that was a thing. Here (NL) contactless payments works with every debit card, physical or stored Apple Google/Pay, in every store. There is no difference between payment providers, everyone offers contactless payments and it works with every bank.
(The only exception are credit cards, but they are not used a lot, mostly for online purchases outside The Netherlands or when renting a car abroad.)
> The system was conceived by the Dutch banks ABN Amro, ING Bank, Postbank N.V. and Rabobank, to develop a single system for online payments that could be used by all banks.
Currently owned by EPI:
> The European Payments Initiative (EPI) is a unified digital payment service launched in 2020 and backed by sixteen founding European banks and payment service providers.
Before iDEAL we had a similar mess with different banks and even a telco pushing their own payment system. It was basically the Dutch webshop foundation (thuiswinkel.org, basically the webshop lobby) that said: f*ck it banks, clean up your mess! And so it happened.
I mean you could have a single protocol and then various different providers still competing, like email, or how even for Visa or Mastercard there's a bunch of different banks that partner up.
Decathlon is pretty neat and technologically advanced actually, so not surprising news for them to adopt Wero.
In eastern European stores they use RFID for every product, so you just throw stuff in a bin without scanning and can self check faster than usual self scan.
Well I have not tried throwing in a bike in a bin or a dumbbell, but I presume it works for 99% of stuff.
Curious what they pay for RFID, last I checked it is about 5-6 cents per item for small quantities.
In eastern European stores they use RFID for every product, so you just throw stuff in a bin without scanning and can self check faster than usual self scan.
Apparently, and I quote from the article (definitely not an LLM):
"Decathlon didn’t just add a new payment button to its German checkout page. It handed European banks their first big-box sporting goods test case at a moment when competition in digital payments is intensifying and the push for EU-made payment infrastructure is growing."
I've been able to make payments for sporting goods shops here in Finland with a push-payment-local-bank-account flow from the checkout for years, but clearly they weren't European enough.
This type of thing (scan QR code) is how basically all payments were done when I was recently in China, via wechat or alipay (either you show your QR code for big shops, or scan their QR code for small shops / vendors. They can just print them out if they want and hang a copy).
I found it superior to other systems I've used in basically every way. Particularly for small market stalls -- I scan their QR code, I enter how much I want to send them. They never get my details, I don't have to trust they didn't fat-finger the price. It also makes it amazingly easy to send money to friends, just scan their code and send them their share of dinner.
It has massive perks, especially in regions where the transaction fee or exchange fee scams run.
(Basically they have a reasonable price showing and when you pay with a credit card you see your banks charges you a huge amount. It can be as simple as in Mexico $ is used for pesos so if the merchant actually charges you USD that's 20x or so rip off).
But... This isn't mutually exclusive, why can't I set a price on my smartphone when I pay by contactless?
The other benefit is that there QR codes are bank transfers. Which have substantially less recourse and less rights for the consumer. Probably doesn't matter for a $10 sandwich but still significant.
I would claim the main cause why it is more complicated is having VAT and KYC/AML requirements. Transactions can be much easier if you ignore the VAT requirement.
I'd much prefer NFC if I could see how much I was paying and had to always confirm it -- I understand this wouldn't have worked with physical cards but I wish it was an option on my phone.
I've also recently seen a Wero option somewhere in Germany. Probably was the transport authority in Berlin, or an air company, I can't quite remember. Haven't seen it in France yet, though.
If European retailers manage to link Wero payments to loyalty schemes, then everyone will benefit and this could eventually become something. Still, no thread to legacy credit card rails (Mastercard, Visa) for many years. The industry doesn’t expect hockey stick growth AFAIK
I'd like the EU to enforce a payment-system agnostic checkout for webshops, which gives me the same payment options everywhere and which also adds a layer of privacy.
That's like, literally impossible? "Hey I just invented ameliuspay, your shop doesn't support it, go directly to jail"
The closest you have is SEPA because it's universal on all Euro bank accounts. And many webshops do offer it. It doesn't integrate into credit card workflows because it's a push payment - you have to go to your banking app, type the details and send the money, while the website waits. Some people might have to go to an actual bank.
What does that even mean, and how is that "EU payment processor platform" not a payment processor itself, meaning that you're mandating one specific payment processor?
Hacker News moment. Imagine someone over 60 whose career has nothing to do with computers trying to make sense of a list of 45 different payment processors to choose from.
It should also present "pay with your personal information" as a legitimate payment option, which would turn on ads (in case you want that). Otherwise ads should stay hidden and user tracking should not happen.
It's time the EU penalizes companies for pushing only AdTech as a payment option. This is unfair competition for the other payment processors.
It isn't. WERO is little more than a wrapper around SEPA transactions. They literally tell your bank to make a transaction. They are not a bank themselves so they never see the money or could take it back. That means the only one who might be able to help you is your bank.
In Norway we have a thing similar to Bizum, called Vipps. I.e. a payment method specialized for sending small person-to-person payments, for example useful when buying something second hand in person from another person, or when splitting a restaurant bill, or paying someone for gas when you rode in their car with them, etc etc.
Vipps is also usable as payment method in several online stores here, just like the above mentioned that Bizum can be used for Amazon Spain. I often use Vipps as payment method when it is available in online stores. It’s quick and convenient, and doesn’t involve giving my card details to a third party payment provider.
Aside from my Norwegian bank card and the Vipps that is connected to the same bank account, I also have Revolut, which supports disposable single-use virtual cards which is an excellent idea in theory and I’ve used that a few times too, but I have had too many cases of trying to pay with Revolut disposable single-use virtual cards and it not working so that what should’ve been a great way to avoid giving my card details to all kinds of third parties instead becomes a hassle where I first try disposable and it’s not going through and then I have to use my long-term multi-use card details to pay anyway.
With Vipps I have not had much trouble. There was a time or two such as for example the other day where I paid for something on Finn (similar to Wallapop in Spain) with Vipps and Finn said there was an error and I tried again and Finn still said it errored. But I just left it like that and it resolved itself. Next day when I logged into Finn again, the purchase had completed and in Vipps one of the two pending attempted payments went through and the other one was reverted as it should, without me having had to reach out to neither Finn nor Vipps myself.
I tend to prefer Bizum over my card, as my newfangled debit card has a CVV code that changes every 10 minutes, so I can no longer just autofill the card with a password manager, I MUST open the bank app to get the CVV code.
With Bizum I don't need that, input my phone number, approve the dialogue in the bank app, then for future purchases it's automatically approved. That no fees goes to American companies is just the cherry on top.
(Decathlon Spain also offers Bizum payments, FWIW)
I get that this is a good thing and long overdue - but the excitement here just underscores for me how expectations in Europe for Europe doing anything truly cutting edge are low.
I think EU citizens are excited mainly because of winning back their digital sovereignty, nobody said this would be cutting edge technology. Actually the simplicity of the solution is key (Wero is based on EU’s proven SEPA Instant Payment rails).
That being said, what I do not like about Wero is that some parts of the infrastructure is based on AWS and or Google cloud; hopefully they will switch to European clouds, soon.
I wouldn't count on that, in-order to provide rock solid financial service, you definitely need a reliable cloud provider. There is no true equivalent in EU for a cloud provider like that at the moment
It sounds like a coupon website installing malware to me. But... names are just names. When adoption gets large enough, every name becomes unimportant I guess.
iShares, iDeal, WhatsApp: the Millenial trinity of European essentials :D
I mean, who cares how you pronounce it? Each country will have its own variant, similar to how euro is pronounced differently in different places, and eventually one will become the English status quo
I agree it's always fast and convenient! It doesn't have the buyer protection you get with a credit card (it debits from your account immediately), but for most purchases that is fine.
Wero is such a valuable asset for Europe and couldn't have come at a better time.
It's built on the excellent SEPA system, which standardized bank transfers and "Lastschrift" in Europe. SEPA itself got a huge upgrade last year with mandatory instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers between European checking accounts.
Both of those allowed Wero to happen as a final abstract top layer, meaning: the UX of sending money to an email address with the security and convenience of bank transfers. And everything is built collaboratively on top of European banking infrastructure.
No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
And before some says: "Well, now the government controls everything!": They already did, since... Ever. Now its one less entity with that access and one that can be (hopefully) controlled and changed by a majority.
Note that Wero is amongs others based on the Dutch iDEAL [1] system, which was introduced 21 years ago. Virtually every Dutch web shop supports iDEAL (and many only support iDEAL) as well as international payment services such as PayPal and Stripe. As a result, the vast majority of transactions of Dutch webshops go through iDEAL. It is really a super-nice frictionless system.
iDEAL also supports P2P payments through Tikkie (ABN AMRO) or the payment request option of other banks. You basically show a QR code or send a link and the person paying goes through the iDEAL flow to transfer the money. Tikkie (and the other bank's similar and compatible systems) have been one of the primary methods for P2P transfers for many years now.
I am really happy that we are getting the same system across multiple countries now. Contactless payments through Wero are also planned, so that we can finally become independent of Google/Apple Pay for contactless payments using a phone.
[1] EPI purchased the Dutch iDEAL and Belgian Payconiq and mentioned on multiple occasions that Wero is based on the foundations of iDEAL. They kept iDEAL running as a separate system in order not to disturb it during the upbringing of Wero, but iDeal is going to migrated to Wero the coming period.
What was the iDEAL payment option now says iDeal WERO. The Dutch are already using WERO for a couple of months now.
We don't, it's the same ideal 2.0 with a different logo. Literally nothing changed and I saw the exact commits too.
Not really. They just changed the logo to make people get used to the name. The next phase where they start migrating the iDEAL infra into Wero starts in October:
https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/actueel/volgende-fase-migrat...
It's not the same system. iDEAL supports banks to implement payment in their online banking websites, while Wero is Google/Apple ecosystem exclusive.
Wero’s goal is to become a European payment system. Like an iDEAL across EU countries. That requires buy-in from major EU banks, some of which are shareholders of EPI, the company behind Wero.
It’s also a response to the ECB’s digital Euro, a way that banks show the central bank “hey, we the banks are actually capable of creating a good EU-level payment system”.
> while Wero is Google/Apple ecosystem exclusive
It's barely launched in more than 5 EU countries. It's not part of the specs or requirements to only be available in the Google / Apple ecosystem.
> It's not part of the specs or requirements to only be available in the Google / Apple ecosystem.
but at the moment, it is. so he's right to be nervous. from one american duopoly to another.
but i share your optimism that they eventually allow this to work without them.
The commenter is stating that as a fact, which is spreading information that's not true to others reading that.
Perfect is the enemy of good as always. Having a system that is currently available on the two biggest mobile platforms for the launch (Covering probably 99.9% of consumers) is already much better than piping every single transaction through two US mega corps.
iDEAL supports banks to implement payment in their online banking websites
So does Wero, as I cited in another comment:
The Wero app is available only for account holders from the German bank Postbank and the French bank La Banque Postale.
Are you a customer of another Wero-enabled bank? If so, you can easily use Wero within your banking app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.epicompany....
It's not the same system.
I said that it is based on the iDEAL system:
Wero is built on the foundation of iDEAL, backed by 16 major European banks – including the Dutch banks behind iDEAL.
https://ideal.nl/en/naar-wero
The European Payments Initiative (EPI) acquired the Dutch payment system iDEAL with the aim of making it the standard payment solution across all European countries. [...] The first step is to make iDEAL the standard in France and Germany because the countries don’t yet have a standard payment system for e-commerce, according to AD. Customers in the Netherlands will notice little of this.
https://nltimes.nl/2023/04/25/dutch-payment-processor-ideal-... / https://www.ad.nl/economie/online-betalingssysteem-ideal-wor...
> instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers
Interesting, I didn't know that. Now, why would anyone want to do a non-instant transfer, then (short of not knowing about it like in my case)? Doesn't this mandate basically make all transfers instant?
A lot of banks won’t even give you the option of a non-instant transfer now, at least here in Portugal. Though non-instant transfers can in theory be recalled since there is some time before the money gets to the destination account, my bank even gives a warning now when doing a transfer to ensure I have the details right because they can not recall a transaction after the money arrives.
They are allowed to set caps, I've seen them down to around €5000 per transaction so it's not literally all transfers. Still free to transfer above, just takes more than a few seconds to do so, presumably for fraud/theft protection. Some banks will make that a daily limit, or configurable, there's some flexibility but they're mandated to justify all limits with no arbitrary discrimination against instant transfers.
In practice, obviously most personal payments are well under that margin, so within-EU bank transfers are defacto instant everywhere. Most banking apps I've seen don't even show an 'instant/slow' option any more, it's just all instant.
> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
Officially you need a Google or Apple account to download a wero capable app from their stores, and Google and Apple can always delete all wero capable apps from their stores like for example with Russian sanctioned banks.
Some banking apps work on non - google play controlled android smartphones, but always only accidentally. Some banks like for example Consorbank already crack down on "sideloading" their app at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/Consorsbank/comments/1p909w1/commen...
If Wero is going to be similar to iDEAL, which it is based on, the payment flow will be through your bank's app. Heck, even the Wero app description says so:
The Wero app is available only for account holders from the German bank Postbank and the French bank La Banque Postale.
Are you a customer of another Wero-enabled bank? If so, you can easily use Wero within your banking app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.epicompany....
I have seen quite some people downloading their banking apps through the Aurora store (admittedly, it's a frontend for the Play Store, but you don't need an account or the app). Or you can use something like APKMirror and verify that they have the correct signing keys.
Of course, if they need Play Services or Play Integrity basic, then you need sandboxed Google Play or microG. If your bank does remote attestation through Play Integrity, then it is game over, but it is worth contacting your bank. E.g. some banks have added the GrapheneOS signing keys and added support for AOSP remote attestation.
I can pay with iDEAL without interacting with a smartphone, using only my laptop and a physical 2FA device provided by my bank. Do you know if this will be possible with Wero?
It's up to your bank actually. Banks (generally) don't want to pay for your hardware key so you need to do a special dance to trigger their compliance bound neural pathways to send you one.
But then the true bliss will arrive the next year with eidas 3.0 or whatever it is called
I am not 100% sure, but I think PSD3 will require that authentication methods without a smartphone are provided:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/qanda_...
Require payment services providers to ensure that all users can benefit from methods to perform SCA which are adapted to their needs and situations and, in particular, that those methods do not depend on one single technology, device or mechanism, for instance on the possession of a smartphone.
While researching Wero initially, I was confused too that no APK is offered. Maybe we can change that.grbn
It’s fine to decouple from US payment and financial infra today and punt on decoupling from US big tech in the future. These changes take time and effort at scale, so it’s about being directionally accurate, not doing all the changes all at once. “You eat an elephant one bite at a time.” Europe is eating the financial infra bites right now. There are other bites to be taken over the next several years.
Similar to Airbus moving critical apps from AWS to France’s Scaleway. Flexing the muscle needed to do the rest, and starting with the most important.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> the UX of sending money to an email address
> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
Who owns domain names (which emails require)? No, don't say people do, people don't own domain names, they lease them, and it's not a right either.
I frequently run into failed SEPA transfers. At least three per month out of ~200. So it could use some more stability for my use case.
In all fairness, I also have a couple of VISA payments that fail every month.
I recently bought something from fahrrad.de and was surprised to see Wero as an payment option. I don't know what I expected, but scanning the QR code and acknowledging the payment in my banking app worked without any issues. The whole process had a very "snappy" feeling without waiting for any of the usual spinners and redirects. So... thumbs up, I guess?
I need to use this thread to mention the Polish payment system Blik. It is one of the most convenient payment systems out there - you generate an ephemeral 6-digit code in your banking app, copy it to the vendor, confirm, done. Works P2P with phone numbers, too.
Interestingly, it would be the perfect system for payments using AI agents - the agent tries to pay, asks user to provide 6-digit code, submits payment request. User confirms via banking app. Done.
There is also a Blik feature to pay in one click - merchant remembers your payment and allows making subsequent payment without code, just by confirming transaction via banking app.
There's an interesting angle to BLIK vs Wero. While I believe QR codes are more convenient it is actually possible to give BLIK over the phone. Which means that youngsters (or fraudsters ;)) have access to their guardians' money over the phone line.
Wero shows that marketing is everything. It's just regular bank transactions with a much larger fee. We could have had EPC QR codes and similar completely free technologies instead.
Wero’s website says they don’t charge fees
So who is charging the fees?
They most likely don't charge fees on consumer.
Usually the fee is on merchant (and it's few % depending on region regulations etc.) Payment providers such as Wero are doing direct bank transfer, which is usually fee-less, but then they can afford to put a on-merchant fee that's much lower than what credit card companies are charging.
Thus the model is win-win-win: Consumer doesn't pay more, Merchant pays less, and Wero gets their share.
Card fee in EU is maximum 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit. By law.
Card companies hated this. They said they'd lose money and have to pull out of the EU entirely if it passed. Turns out, they lied!
Free for individuals, but paid if you're the business it seems from what I've found? If that's the case, it seems to be the same as a card in the US and I wouldn't be surprised if some businesses try to pass it on like they do with cards.
[0] https://www.mollie.com/growth/wero-payment-guide#:~:text=How...
[1] https://www.bnpparibasfortis.be/en/public/faq/how-much-does-...
Pix is Brazil is also paid by the merchants. ~0.33%.
Individuals is completely free. You can transfer even to people without bank accounts (and withdraw on places like corner shops and authorized merchants).
For companies certain transfers are free. eg: my company pays nothing, since I'm not a merchant, one of the banks tried to charge once and I just changed to another that offered 0% in return for keeping investments there.
Some banks offer extra services like POS machines with instant confirmation and so on (so the POS employee don't need access to the company bank account).
How much is in this case?
>Our pricing is clear and merchant-friendly: a small percentage fee with built-in caps
https://wero-wallet.eu/e-m-commerce
So they charge a fee, but they don't specify what a "small percentage" is.
The payment service provider (like Stripe or Adyen).
> We could have had EPC QR codes and similar completely free technologies instead.
Technically you can anyway, I used that a few months ago. Bank app support is the big impediment (https://epc-qr.eu/bankreviews/)
I mean, that was always possible and many offered that. Wero offers the PayPal style integrated flow, QR code scanning from your banking app is slightly higher friction
God I wish the US had a digital payment system that we could all basically agree on. Having Apple Pay vs Google Pay vs Zelle vs Paypal vs Venmo vs all the others is annoying as hell.
The first time I read "US store X supports Apple Pay or Google Pay now" I was really confused. I didn't know that was a thing. Here (NL) contactless payments works with every debit card, physical or stored Apple Google/Pay, in every store. There is no difference between payment providers, everyone offers contactless payments and it works with every bank.
(The only exception are credit cards, but they are not used a lot, mostly for online purchases outside The Netherlands or when renting a car abroad.)
It is one of these instances where « let the market decide » is not necessarily the best option on the long run.
The market wants to take a cut per transaction, perpetually. At a high profit margin.
This is one where not the market but a country/group of countries need to rollout their own public payments so fees are minimal to zero.
You mean, communism?
(/s but you never know especially these days)
Ideal was a result of free market banking though.
> The system was conceived by the Dutch banks ABN Amro, ING Bank, Postbank N.V. and Rabobank, to develop a single system for online payments that could be used by all banks.
Currently owned by EPI:
> The European Payments Initiative (EPI) is a unified digital payment service launched in 2020 and backed by sixteen founding European banks and payment service providers.
Before iDEAL we had a similar mess with different banks and even a telco pushing their own payment system. It was basically the Dutch webshop foundation (thuiswinkel.org, basically the webshop lobby) that said: f*ck it banks, clean up your mess! And so it happened.
I mean you could have a single protocol and then various different providers still competing, like email, or how even for Visa or Mastercard there's a bunch of different banks that partner up.
Decathlon is pretty neat and technologically advanced actually, so not surprising news for them to adopt Wero.
In eastern European stores they use RFID for every product, so you just throw stuff in a bin without scanning and can self check faster than usual self scan.
Well I have not tried throwing in a bike in a bin or a dumbbell, but I presume it works for 99% of stuff.
Curious what they pay for RFID, last I checked it is about 5-6 cents per item for small quantities.
In eastern European stores they use RFID for every product, so you just throw stuff in a bin without scanning and can self check faster than usual self scan.
Yep, same here in West Europe.
Well I have not tried throwing in a bike
Haha, that would make a great Youtube skit.
Why is this news? In the Netherlands the ideal system is already replaced by Wero ? What am I missing.
Apparently, and I quote from the article (definitely not an LLM):
"Decathlon didn’t just add a new payment button to its German checkout page. It handed European banks their first big-box sporting goods test case at a moment when competition in digital payments is intensifying and the push for EU-made payment infrastructure is growing."
I've been able to make payments for sporting goods shops here in Finland with a push-payment-local-bank-account flow from the checkout for years, but clearly they weren't European enough.
It’s not about the Netherlands, that’s what you seem to be misunderstanding
The article is about Europe and the last time I checked, the Netherlands is in Europe.
> Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
This type of thing (scan QR code) is how basically all payments were done when I was recently in China, via wechat or alipay (either you show your QR code for big shops, or scan their QR code for small shops / vendors. They can just print them out if they want and hang a copy).
I found it superior to other systems I've used in basically every way. Particularly for small market stalls -- I scan their QR code, I enter how much I want to send them. They never get my details, I don't have to trust they didn't fat-finger the price. It also makes it amazingly easy to send money to friends, just scan their code and send them their share of dinner.
It has massive perks, especially in regions where the transaction fee or exchange fee scams run.
(Basically they have a reasonable price showing and when you pay with a credit card you see your banks charges you a huge amount. It can be as simple as in Mexico $ is used for pesos so if the merchant actually charges you USD that's 20x or so rip off).
But... This isn't mutually exclusive, why can't I set a price on my smartphone when I pay by contactless?
The other benefit is that there QR codes are bank transfers. Which have substantially less recourse and less rights for the consumer. Probably doesn't matter for a $10 sandwich but still significant.
I would claim the main cause why it is more complicated is having VAT and KYC/AML requirements. Transactions can be much easier if you ignore the VAT requirement.
To me NFC is superior. It checks all the boxes you mentioned plus quicker / last steps
I'd much prefer NFC if I could see how much I was paying and had to always confirm it -- I understand this wouldn't have worked with physical cards but I wish it was an option on my phone.
> competition in digital payments
What competition? Here in the Netherlands, iDeal (which is already renamed to Wero) has almost no competition. Perhaps PayPal a few percent
In Germany PayPal is pretty huge
Visa
MasterCard
After the pandemic, Germany truly picked up cashless payments. But still a long way to go, especially to prevent tax evasion
I've also recently seen a Wero option somewhere in Germany. Probably was the transport authority in Berlin, or an air company, I can't quite remember. Haven't seen it in France yet, though.
If European retailers manage to link Wero payments to loyalty schemes, then everyone will benefit and this could eventually become something. Still, no thread to legacy credit card rails (Mastercard, Visa) for many years. The industry doesn’t expect hockey stick growth AFAIK
I'd like the EU to enforce a payment-system agnostic checkout for webshops, which gives me the same payment options everywhere and which also adds a layer of privacy.
That's like, literally impossible? "Hey I just invented ameliuspay, your shop doesn't support it, go directly to jail"
The closest you have is SEPA because it's universal on all Euro bank accounts. And many webshops do offer it. It doesn't integrate into credit card workflows because it's a push payment - you have to go to your banking app, type the details and send the money, while the website waits. Some people might have to go to an actual bank.
If ameliuspay is properly registered with the EU payment processor platform, then it should automatically appear as an option in the webshop.
What does that even mean, and how is that "EU payment processor platform" not a payment processor itself, meaning that you're mandating one specific payment processor?
Hacker News moment. Imagine someone over 60 whose career has nothing to do with computers trying to make sense of a list of 45 different payment processors to choose from.
And if they miss even one of those 45, EU enforcers burn their business to the ground. Oops, now it's 46. No, 47.
It should also present "pay with your personal information" as a legitimate payment option, which would turn on ads (in case you want that). Otherwise ads should stay hidden and user tracking should not happen.
It's time the EU penalizes companies for pushing only AdTech as a payment option. This is unfair competition for the other payment processors.
I always use Paypal because they have buyers protection, and this has already saved me countless of times.
Would like to see if this is also offered in the Wero ecosystem?
It isn't. WERO is little more than a wrapper around SEPA transactions. They literally tell your bank to make a transaction. They are not a bank themselves so they never see the money or could take it back. That means the only one who might be able to help you is your bank.
Related:
Lidl Introduces the European Payment Method Wero in Germany
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060205
In Spain we can pay using Bizum on many websites, including Amazon.
For Amazon Spain I use my debit card. Is there an upside to using Bizum?
In Norway we have a thing similar to Bizum, called Vipps. I.e. a payment method specialized for sending small person-to-person payments, for example useful when buying something second hand in person from another person, or when splitting a restaurant bill, or paying someone for gas when you rode in their car with them, etc etc.
Vipps is also usable as payment method in several online stores here, just like the above mentioned that Bizum can be used for Amazon Spain. I often use Vipps as payment method when it is available in online stores. It’s quick and convenient, and doesn’t involve giving my card details to a third party payment provider.
Aside from my Norwegian bank card and the Vipps that is connected to the same bank account, I also have Revolut, which supports disposable single-use virtual cards which is an excellent idea in theory and I’ve used that a few times too, but I have had too many cases of trying to pay with Revolut disposable single-use virtual cards and it not working so that what should’ve been a great way to avoid giving my card details to all kinds of third parties instead becomes a hassle where I first try disposable and it’s not going through and then I have to use my long-term multi-use card details to pay anyway.
With Vipps I have not had much trouble. There was a time or two such as for example the other day where I paid for something on Finn (similar to Wallapop in Spain) with Vipps and Finn said there was an error and I tried again and Finn still said it errored. But I just left it like that and it resolved itself. Next day when I logged into Finn again, the purchase had completed and in Vipps one of the two pending attempted payments went through and the other one was reverted as it should, without me having had to reach out to neither Finn nor Vipps myself.
I tend to prefer Bizum over my card, as my newfangled debit card has a CVV code that changes every 10 minutes, so I can no longer just autofill the card with a password manager, I MUST open the bank app to get the CVV code.
With Bizum I don't need that, input my phone number, approve the dialogue in the bank app, then for future purchases it's automatically approved. That no fees goes to American companies is just the cherry on top.
(Decathlon Spain also offers Bizum payments, FWIW)
Got it. In my case I don’t have to use my bank app at all. Just go to checkout with Amazon and it automatically charges it from my bank account.
Technological independence from the US, which in recent times has proven not to be a reliable partner for the European Union.
I get that this is a good thing and long overdue - but the excitement here just underscores for me how expectations in Europe for Europe doing anything truly cutting edge are low.
I think EU citizens are excited mainly because of winning back their digital sovereignty, nobody said this would be cutting edge technology. Actually the simplicity of the solution is key (Wero is based on EU’s proven SEPA Instant Payment rails).
That being said, what I do not like about Wero is that some parts of the infrastructure is based on AWS and or Google cloud; hopefully they will switch to European clouds, soon.
I wouldn't count on that, in-order to provide rock solid financial service, you definitely need a reliable cloud provider. There is no true equivalent in EU for a cloud provider like that at the moment
The excitement isn't about innovation but about solving a problem: Increasingly unreliable US in payment system
iDeal is amazing and it's great it's coming to the rest of Europe, even if they gave it a worse name.
Here in the Benelux it's the go-to payment option for ecommerce.
I think this will be a much bigger threat to Visa and Mastercard than the oft-promised digital Euro.
> I think this will be a much bigger threat to Visa and Mastercard than the oft-promised digital Euro.
Not just the American card networks but also a threat to the US Dollar as the reserve currency and the power it gives to the USA
Hence why USA is unhappy with Brazil over their Pix system
Afaik the system is being consolidated
https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/ideal-to-phase-into-wer...
« iDEAL will begin rebranding to iDEAL | Wero in 2026 »
I actually like Wero a lot as a name, sound like virtual euro to me.
I don't think the name is that bad. iDeal sounds very dated to me as a native English speaker.
It sounds like a coupon website installing malware to me. But... names are just names. When adoption gets large enough, every name becomes unimportant I guess.
iShares, iDeal, WhatsApp: the Millenial trinity of European essentials :D
How would you even pronounce wero as a native English speaker?
We - ro? Wer-o?
At least iDeal was unambiguous.
> How would you even pronounce wero as a native English speaker?
Thankfully, only about 2% of the EU population speaks English natively.
[0] https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/dow... Page 10
I heard the gimmick was euro (you-ro) -- wero (we-ro). Which leaves ayero and dayro.
I mean, who cares how you pronounce it? Each country will have its own variant, similar to how euro is pronounced differently in different places, and eventually one will become the English status quo
> I think this will be a much bigger threat to Visa and Mastercard than the oft-promised digital Euro
Wasn't the digital Euro specifically crippled due to banks lobbying against it to promote Wero instead?
I agree it's always fast and convenient! It doesn't have the buyer protection you get with a credit card (it debits from your account immediately), but for most purchases that is fine.
Well I guess I have good news for you (and bad news for Dutch merchants), because Wero does offer the ability to dispute.
Presse release: https://einblicke.decathlon.de/presse/pressekit/digitale-inn...