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.
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.
Actually, look closer when you pay using Ideal (as we all do). You will notice that usually there are several payment methods, and these almost always include credit cards.
The reason for this is not because the Dutch like to pay using credit cards (most Dutch never use one), but because of a little known law regarding online stores. It is, in fact, not allowed to only offer payment options that require the customer to pay the full amount upfront. And Ideal (and Wero) do just that: you order a T-shirt for €20, you pay €20 upfront, the shirt gets shipped, and you receive it.
Now have a look at this note:
https://www.acm.nl/nl/verkoop-aan-consumenten/de-koop-sluite...
> U mag maximaal 50% vooruitbetaling vragen voor producten die u nog moet leveren.
> Dit betekent dat u standaard mag aanbieden om het hele bedrag te betalen. Maar u geeft klanten ook de mogelijkheid om minimaal 50% pas na levering te betalen.
There are almost no online stores which offer this of course. It's just not part of this commercial model. Not for a T-shirt (or whatever).
So what is the trick the government itself even recommends?
Credit cards.
https://ondernemersplein.overheid.nl/geldzaken-en-belastinge...
Something about the way credit card payments reserve payments initially and the way credit cards offer consumer protection services makes this a payment option which, apparently, fulfils this 50% after delivery rule…
Regardless of how much I like the idea of a payments layer without Visa/Mastercard fees, I think the rich engineers of hackernews and 10,000 overpaid consultants who worked on this massively underestimate how valuable an interest-free 30 day bridge loan is to average people (and businesses) on monthly payroll.
Combine this with the consumer protections and threat of a dispute (which almost always sides with the buyer) and it generally tilts power to the consumer in most credit card transactions, if the consumer has autopay setup (huge caveat of course).
This new layer is totally neutral, and removes the detriment to the merchant in terms of fees/risk, but not sure it’s actually as good for the market as claimed here. For me it’s a net loss, and harming consumers ultimately harms the merchant in terms of willingness to buy things. If it becomes trendy for merchants to start refusing credit cards to use this instead, I will be WAY less likely to take a risk on a purchase I’m not 100% confident about.
Im not willing to try new products from most startups for example if I can’t buy on a credit card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
The US used to be an outlier in this regard if you look back to 2000, but over the past 25+ years American households have stayed pretty much the same while their European counterparts have grown debt substantially.
Meanwhile, while headline credit card interest rates in the US look insane (like 20%+), in reality loss-adjusted yield actually realized by lenders and paid by consumers (after renegotiated settlements, bankruptcies, payment plans, etc) is less than half that.
You can look at the realized return on personal credit lending on companies balance sheets, its basically like 3.7%. Maybe a few percent more return than what a 30 year mortgage lender can expect going forward (now that we're returning to post-GFC 'normalized' interest rates).
https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/actueel/volgende-fase-migrat...
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”.
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 is not possible to send Wero payments to friends & family via a web browser or on a computer
https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...
So its pretty clear they have no plans to support plain browser access. Which is a very strange decision to me.
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.
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.
https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116215341782832097 https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116125936995037426
> Good morning, it's not "our" fault. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it—Wero is a service offered by EPI, and they've decided to take a "mobile-first" approach for now. Warm regards from Bochum!
As for the prospects of ever seeing banking apps outside of android/ios, there is only https://www.das-parlament.de/wirtschaft/finanzen/wir-bauen-m...
> What about smartphones that run on free and open-source software instead of the commercial operating systems used by the iPhone or Google? > Tanja Müller-Ziegler: This market is still very much a niche one. There are still too few providers, which is why it’s hardly worth offering banking apps for these devices.
> Perfect is the enemy of good as always.
I'm no expert on iDEAL, but being 20 years old, it's older than Android and iOS and presumably supported web based payments from the very beginning. I really don't understand why nowadays people seem to think that app exclusivity is somehow a natural starting point. It's a relatively recent invention.
That's hardly a confirmation that it will never be possible ("for now"). It seems like a fair tradeoff for a launch when almost everyone has a smartphone and that's already enforced like that for many parts of life (I'm not saying it's great, but it's a valid tradeoff when alternative options exist) like banking or public transport where the happy path often is a phone app.
It's fine as long as we have alternatives, but if online shops were to start to phase out SEPA payments in favor of Wero and Wero-only shops were to start popping it, it would be a real problem.
Btw the solution already exists: It's still relatively small scale but GNU Taler is live in Switzerland. The EU could make regulation to make it easier to adopt at any time it wants.
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.
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...
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...
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.
Wero app Play Store page: "This item isn't available in your country."
Hard to cheer for a thing when it prevents you to access your own money, and promises to "easily pay" immediately fall flat.
Paypal is bad but at least it doesn't fail at step 0.
I had a similar moment of stupidifiedment trying to park in Germany with a phone set to Dutch region. Euro in cash works everywhere Euros are accepted but apps on the freaking Internet? Nah, gotta restrict that to the publisher country only.
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.
But then the true bliss will arrive the next year with eidas 3.0 or whatever it is called
The GLS bank implies it's not up to them. Generally I feel like implementation details are intentionally not made public. For example so far there is no definitive statement on the public internet I could find about whether iDEAL web based payments will still be available after iDEAL will actually switch to Wero. Statements like "For consumers, the online payment experience will remain largely unchanged, as they will continue to pay through their own bank." are always kept vague.
What I don't get is -- what will be added on top of what ideal already does.
>The GLS bank implies it's not up to them.
They probably can't make two systems within the bank talk to each other for whatever reason. One reason could be -- we are afraid to touch one side and the other is supplied by a vendor. Or politics, or just a plain skill issue. I'm not them and can't possibly know, but my employer was named in comments already, so I feel like I can extrapolate a bit
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 way selection function for the technical parties in this conversation is going makes it double the fun.
But there is another reason why some may prefer standard: due to the instant payment rules banks are not able to hold inbound payments for screening so if a payment trips a flip that requires screening then it will be rejected. Other payment rails will typically result in the payment being held for a manual review where it will be released shortly later. Instant payments will be rejected if not crediting the recipient in a few seconds.
As this disproportionately affects people with names in common with sanctions lists, to send money to/from those people sometimes a standard transfer is the only option.
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?
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.
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.
In all fairness, I also have a couple of VISA payments that fail every month.
> It is not possible to send Wero payments to friends & family via a web browser or on a computer
Truly independent from US companies ... If you don't have an iOS or an Android device, you are just stuck, once again
Wow, that's a deal breaker for me. I don't need yet another service that's only accessible to a dumbed down device. Here I was hoping that it'd become available in my country as well...
When that are said. I 100% agree with you - one step at a time.
I think Wero will no longer depend on that in 3–5 years. It's just real challenges that the European banking system needs to figure out.
The EU works slow, but it does move :)
Kind of like the Ents in LOTR
Wero has no such requirement. The bank that you use to interoperate with Wero might require Google Play Integrity though.
The latest I heard about an alternative to Google play services was https://www.heise.de/en/news/Paying-without-Google-New-conso...
If you where able to send and receive I was obviously wrong. I'm very glad but also confused.
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.
They also have a lot of vertical integration, they manufacture many of the products they sell.
It was very cool to try, and very much a "why doesn't everyone do this?" feature. I've never seen it anywhere else.
Yep, same here in West Europe.
Well I have not tried throwing in a bike
Haha, that would make a great Youtube skit.
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 EMP association (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...) which both BLIK and Bizum and bunch of others (I'd say majority of Europe) are members of that are already working on integration and Spain and Italy already work.
https://www.corporate.sibs.com/europa-the-future-of-payments...
Basically with Wero on decathlon.de the DACH is discoveryng local-digital-payments and are excited about something that the rest of Europe enjoyed for a long while ;)
Doubly so when the phone is a foldable, so you can keep the bank open in a popup over the browser or app you're buying in.
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.
(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.
Maybe that's why they were separate formats BUT afaik even SPAYD uses IBAN account numbers. So I have no idea why there are both of these, they are just syntax. The main difference being that SPAYD is key:value pair separated by * and EPC is fixed position, line delimited. I personally think SPAYD is more human readable and extensible BUT i guess less efficient. Not that it would matter i would prefer the one that's universal.
So who is charging the fees?
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 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!
[0] https://www.mollie.com/growth/wero-payment-guide#:~:text=How...
[1] https://www.bnpparibasfortis.be/en/public/faq/how-much-does-...
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?
https://wero-wallet.eu/e-m-commerce
So they charge a fee, but they don't specify what a "small percentage" is.
That's why it's impossible to find on that link what their fee is. It's so clear that it's invisible.
Technically you can anyway, I used that a few months ago. Bank app support is the big impediment (https://epc-qr.eu/bankreviews/)
With Wero it's across all banks, building on the recent instant transfer that is being rolled out quickly while still having the same, familiar UX as PayPal or other apps like that while being a EU solution.
If you look at the video for how Wero online payments work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu5_X3oSgHM), you'll see that an EPC QR code could just as well be used (with a banking app installed instead of Wero).
With Wero you probably also get automatic processing of the incoming payment, without having to connect the financial transaction to a purchase yourself. But payment through bank transfers is also available through the payment service providers and costs less than Wero (at least it costs less when using Mollie; the Stripe fee is the same for Wero and bank transfer, and Adyen apparently hasn't published the Wero fee yet). So you'd still get the same service for less money.
(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.)
That's how it works in the US as well. You might be conflating Apple Pay with Apple Wallet, which stores your credit cards for tap-to-pay. Most people in the US use Apple Wallet/Google Wallet to digitally store their credit/debit cards, and use those cards to pay at the store by tapping the POS terminal.
For example, I use Apple Wallet for nearly every transaction, but I never use Apple Pay/Apple Card as the payment method.
The method described in that guide is basically how you setup Apple Pay.
Apple Wallet is simply where the card is located on your phone. Once you use it to pay, you will use Apple Pay.
This is one of the reasons why Garmin Pay is pretty useless here. Most banks only support it with credit cards and a lot of stores do not take credit card-based contactless payments (with some exceptions like e.g. Jumbo and Decathlon).
The reason is that debit cards have been the standard cards since the beginning. Nowadays more people have a credit card for online shopping outside the country, etc. But when I was young my dad had a credit card and that was fairly exceptional.
I'd buy myself a shitload of rupees (for a couple of tenners) if they were still around. Such a missed chance.
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.
> 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.
They even tried to extend it to other European countries in 2011: https://www.bnnvara.nl/kassa/artikelen/ideal-in-de-ban-van-m...
Other countries are working to avoid the US financial infra rake and grift, but you’re captured by it if you’re stuck in the US unfortunately, because the US political will does not exist to compress profits for the financial services industry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416032
FedNow Is Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 - July 2023 (1022 comments)
They're trying to ease in Dutch customers to the Wero brand, but in the mean time they're confusing every tourist or immigrant with their wero-but-not-wero system.
"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.
> Decathlon switched on Wero on decathlon.de on July 20, making Germany the first market in the French group’s international footprint to carry the European payment scheme.
That's probably the cause for confusion, because the Dutch system has been rebranding itself to Wero for ages and switched over permanently very recently.
Decathlon.nl has had Wero for months, though they did it through a different implementation method. Of course, the marketeers prefer to put the focus onto the next-gen system their German counterparts have just implemented.
Seems to be a weird marketing article
Would like to see if this is also offered in the Wero ecosystem?
> 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.
There are 16 decathlon locations in 4 provinces. They also have an online store. The Toronto suburbs stores closed. They by no means "basically left Canada". They just left the GTA.
Much to the surprise of many in Ontario, there are quite a few places outside of that province that can be considered Canada.
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.
It's time the EU penalizes companies for pushing only AdTech as a payment option. This is unfair competition for the other payment processors.
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.
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)
Wow, is it using e-paper? Cool!
> ..., I MUST open the bank app to get the CVV code.
Ah. Gotcha.
That would be cool, but no, the physical card itself has no numbers on it all in any shape or form, not even the expiry date.
Many other EU countries have had similar systems for years, but Wero is standardizing it between a bunch of countries.
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.
What use is american cloud reliability if it can't be trusted in with sovereignty the first place?
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.
https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/ideal-to-phase-into-wer...
« iDEAL will begin rebranding to iDEAL | Wero in 2026 »
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
iShares, iDeal, WhatsApp: the Millenial trinity of European essentials :D
We - ro? Wer-o?
At least iDeal was unambiguous.
Thankfully, only about 2% of the EU population speaks English natively.
[0] https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/dow... Page 10
Wasn't the digital Euro specifically crippled due to banks lobbying against it to promote Wero instead?
That said, I wouldn't be surprised regarding lobbying.
Looks like the PSP don't really lower the fees of Wero transactions right now.
New systems like Wero (or similar ones already widely established in India or Brazil) are based on instant bank transfers rather than a credit card company that acts as a middle man.
On the German Wero site[1], the copy not only uses utterly gratuitous and even made up fake English words where there are perfectly adequate German words, e.g., "senden", hero, support, business, etc.; but the worst part is that they mess up or maybe can't even realize anymore that the German word for hero in "Der absolute Hero für dein Geld!" could have produced a far superior phrase through a rhyme, i.e., "Der absolute Held für dein Geld!". It's nonsensical to use "hero". Why would you use "hero"?
What are you doing, Germans? "Senden" is not a word. You just made that up! Or should I say "you just hooberdoobered it" since we are just making up gibberish words? We don't say "senden"... why are you saying "senden"?? It's like a traumatized child making up a gibberish language to live in a fantasy world. It's not healthy.
It's also really rather discriminatory towards older people who may not know this weird hipster pig-german made up gibberish.
For context for Americans or other actual English speakers, imagine if an American spoke like this:
"Come on, Niemcy, use your own słowa. You are worth it. Leave other ludzie's words for them to use. Have some szacunek. It's kind of żałosne actually. Get it together już." It's Polish, btw.
Does that convey the level of cringe? It's weird!
Because it rhymes with Wero (or with Vero)
And "senden" is absolutely a word, duh