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German, well West European, banks are slow in creating a competitor to Paypal, called Wero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.or

• tietjens 1y ago
  The product features sound nice. I'm all for anything that replaces Giropay.
• arianvanp 1y ago
  Mostly German. The predecessor of Wero (iDeal) has been in use in The Netherlands for almost two decades. Nobody has credit cards here and everyone does online shopping with iDeal
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    To add, on top of iDeal (I think they're on top anyway, they're digital payment whatsits anyway) there's an age verification system using a similar protocol - where a website gets a "yes this person is >18" signal, nothing else, from the user's bank. And there's "tikkie" (payment request), allowing people to request money through a link and people's own bank account - no need for everyone to use the same apps or services like paypal or cashapp.
    • tchalla 1y ago
      > where a website gets a "yes this person is >18" signal, nothing else, from the user's bank. I am amazed on how this practical solution can't be implemented for age verification instead of all those ID uploads etc.
      • mastermage 1y ago
        Because legislators don't understand how the internet works. Thats like the biggest problem. IMHO.
• BoredPositron 1y ago
  It's like their 5th attempt and the naming gets worse every time.
  • cubefox 1y ago
    Wero seems to be a more European solution, while previous attempts like GiroPay were national.
    • tpm 1y ago
      Looking at the Wero page, it's not very European if 4 countries are listed. I have never heard of it here in Slovakia, and none of our banks are listed, although some belong to the groups that are there. This will be a long process if it really wants to be European.
      • cubefox 1y ago
        Maybe in Slovakia there is already an established payment system which uses instant bank transfers, so there is no need for Wero. Or maybe some countries are fine with PayPal (or similar) fees.
        • tpm 1y ago
          There isn't, people mostly pay by card or cash/card on delivery. Instant transfers started being an option but I don't think it's widely used.
• thibaut_barrere 1y ago
  Wero is getting traction quite quickly in France (source: https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/a-votre-service/particuliers/mieux-connaitre-moyens-paiement/wero https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/a-votre-service/particuliers... + people around me). Also: https://wero-wallet.eu/fr/utilisateurs https://wero-wallet.eu/fr/utilisateurs
• fweimer 1y ago
  The existing giro system is the real Paypal competitor. Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email. Merchants probably want to rely on another party to maintain their integration, but there is no real need for another centralized service similar to Paypal. (The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used, and many residents would not even know how to access it. Hence Paypal's network effect can offer value there. Europe is very different.)
  • red_trumpet 1y ago
    > Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email. Bank transfers were not instant though, they usually took a work day. This is changing with the introduction of instant transfers, which become mandatory to support this year, and are also not allowed to be more expensive since this year also.
    • ta12653421 1y ago
      But the merchant got a signal that the money is on the way, so it was quick enough for them to sent out the package.
  • alistairSH 1y ago
    The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used I wasn't even aware such a thing existed? Or do you mean Zelle, which seems to be some sort of hybrid system... It's not quite a giro system as found in most of EU, more like "PayPal, but built by BofA and CapOne"
    • fweimer 1y ago
      I don't do much banking in the U.S. system, but I'm assuming that ACH transfers get you pretty close to a giro system. Apparently, they are quite slow by SEPA's standards.
      • 1y ago
• euroderf 1y ago
  Finland has MobilePay, it links bank accounts to phone numbers, very easy to use.
  • gambiting 1y ago
    Poland has Blik, it's amazing and I wish it existed everywhere - you can pay someone using a phone number or you can generate a Blik number that you can give anyone else to request or send a payment - and it's instant. Most stores accept Blik payments, and I've paid using it in places where bank cards are not accepted or where there is no infrastructure to accept them - just use Blik.
• tchalla 1y ago
  German banks (and in general businesses) are amazing. They won't do anything until legally required to do so and even then will drag their feet. There has been instant bank transfers (transfers in 10 seconds) available for a while - launched in November 2017. German banks kept charging 1.5€ for this instant transfer or some didn't have them available at all. They didn't build any of these systems and yet this was their stand. On January 9 2025, EU made it compulsory to have receipt of transfers instant and in October 2025 - sending too should be available at the same cost as the normal transfer. There's nothing stopping from implementing bot send/receive instant transfers in January 2025. Yet, some of these banks only enabled instant receipts in January and will make the sending available exactly on 8th October 2025, 1 day before the deadline. What a business mindset to have!
  • tietjens 1y ago
    Care to name those banks?
    • leipert 1y ago
      One prominent example is DKB (easily in the top 10 consumer banks by size)
      • Semaphor 1y ago
        Also a bank that thought it was a great idea to block all rooted Android users with a minor update to their app. Which is required to use their website. Fuck DKB.
  • scns 1y ago
    Have used them for a long time, never paid for them. GLS is a great bank, happy customer. The crappy ones like to keep your money in their books as long as possible.
  • the_duke 1y ago
    The resistance against instant payments mostly has to do with technicalities around bank balance sheets and inter-bank settlement systems. It's a bit complex for a comment, but the TLDR is: * funds in transit (called "positive float") are held in the banks account, and can be used by the bank to earn interest * liquidity management - there are a bunch of considerations here, but the longer settlement periods enable banks to do "deferred net settlements" (just paying each other the difference between all transactions in a batched way) and also helps balance sheets in other ways, making it easier to meet reserve requirements, smoothing out intra-day liquidity, etc The delay also means systems have more time to catch fraudulent transactions, and to block them before they happen.
• miduil 1y ago
  There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro in the making. I think that would then also supersede Wero? Portugal got mbway, Austria used to have paybox, there is iDEAL, sofort.com and generally besides the local country systems with de-facto European banks you get "SEPA Instant Credit Transfer" nowadays - however IBAN is "harder" to share than lets say the phone number your friends already got.
• mrweasel 1y ago
  They never really had much of a reason to create a competitor. There where already plenty of alternatives once online shopping/payments became a thing. Here you could do "cash on delivery", credit/debit card, account transfers (yes even across banks, it not as big an issue as US banks makes it) or you could send stamps (not a popular options). There was never a need for PayPal or PayPal style services. These days it's safe to assume that people have a debit card (or MobilePay in the case of Denmark).
  • rvnx 1y ago
    The + of PayPal was in 2005 when you could use it to hide your card number from the merchant. But now, you can generate one-time use cards, which are safer than assigning a card on your PayPal account. The other thing, is that you can do chargebacks more easily, when you buy on eBay, but this comes at the cost of higher fees (which is basically insurance) Other than that, it's a platform that cannot be trusted
    • mrweasel 1y ago
      I can't speak to how other European countries did only payments, but you never gave your credit card number to the merchant in Denmark. It was always done via a 3rd. party payment provider, initially mostly DIBS, then came WorldPay and later many more. Charge backs was also always fairly easily done via your bank. Though you did have to call them, so yes PayPal was/is easier. I don't know, the trust in PayPal was always really really low.
      • rvnx 1y ago
        It was before 2006 (enforcement of PCI DSS), at that time, a lot of merchants just created and hosted themselves a payment form and stored bank card numbers themselves, numbers that they often collected on non-HTTPS pages
        • mrweasel 1y ago
          Because the banks are liable to fraud in Denmark, probably also other countries, they already had really strict rules for online payments. Denmark also has it's own national payment card "Dankort", and before 2006, you needed to accept Dankork as it was the most popular debit card. The Danish banks could make their own rules, separately from PCI DSS, and those where much stricter, so no http and only specially audited software was allowed to handle the transactions. The downside was a near monopoly from DIBS.
• weinzierl 1y ago
  Wero looks very much like a bureaucratic paper tiger to me. I do not know a single person that uses it despite the massive advertising campaign they are running. What really replaces Paypal in my everyday life is Revolut.
  • anal_reactor 1y ago
    Half of Europe has widely used national systems for instant payments, the other half does not. The idea behind Wero is to unify this to one single system, available across whole Europe. For reference, I use these systems for like 80% of my online payments. Of course nobody's using Wero now because the whole thing isn't really online yet, just a pilot program on a few websites with a few banks.
    • hadrien01 1y ago
      > As of November 2024, the service counts 14 million users and 8 million transactions were made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment) 8 million transactions in only a few months (mostly in France), I wouldn't say "nobody's using Wero"
    • ta12653421 1y ago
      mainly wrong: WERO is an application/UI layer on top of SCT INST payment scheme, which adds some additional features like "send to email" etc. as well as other pay-specific features in the future (pay-per-request, which is also a defined way in the SEPA/EURO rulebooks and processing docs)
• tnolet 1y ago
  Wait till you learn about iDeal. Basically flawless online payments for 10+ years in the Netherlands. Dominates the entire online and offline markets. No cards, no signups, just your normal bank account. P.S. lives in Germany 5+ years and can attest its banks and online banking are generations behind its neighboring countries. A travesty.
• mastermage 1y ago
  Its alread built into my Banking app (Sparkasse). So if your Bank is a partner it takes like 2 minutes to setup.