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Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoRelated: https://werotracker.eu/ https://werotracker.eu/ Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958399 - February 2026 (1020 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963089 (Wero subthread)
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- hirako2000 8mo agoThat is what it's all about. Europe has realised it is dependent on potentially hostile U.S owned payment infrastructure.
- HelloUsername 8mo agoWero Wallet has been posted half a year ago as well but 1 comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683739
- midzer 8mo agoThere is Taler already https://www.taler.net/ https://www.taler.net/
- lacoolj 8mo agoThis is like someone posting a link to Venmo and you saying "There is CashApp already"
- uxhacker 8mo agoTaler is cool but different. Wero is about moving money from your bank account to someone else’s bank account using a phone number to identify the recipient. It is very similar to many other mobile money systems. What make it different is that it is pan European Taler is about moving money without necessarily using a bank account
- ninalanyon 8mo agoWero is a long way from pan-European. It operates in three countries so far. We already have a similar thing in the Nordics (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) called Vipps that uses one's phone number. You can also use it to pay in shops much as one uses Google Wallet or Apple. It's been in operation in Norway for over ten years.
- hocuspocus 8mo agoVipps MobilePay is already part of EPI's initiative towards pan-European cooperation, as well as Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), SIBS (Portugal). Once Wero becomes usable in Austria, France, Germany, Benelux, and interoperable with those, the few remaining players will have a strong incentive to join.
- mhitza 8mo agoThat is a (much better) ecosystem that someone must host and provide. Holefully more providers will pop up in the years to come.
- gregman1 8mo agoIirc many countries decided to not participate in this. Does anyone know why?
- ramon156 8mo agoLets be real, it's to put the power into EU's hands. With iDeal, the dutch company had the power.
- mzajc 8mo agoFrom what I've gathered, they've decided to make this completely unusable without a Google- or Apple-approved smartphone. Horrible! Are individual banks even allowed to make that an option for clients? Though even if they are, I doubt any will. I would LOVE a PayPal alternative, but this is just not it. -- From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240401-What-devices-support-the-Wero-app https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...: > It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.
- zb3 8mo agoAh, so this EU wallet is only usable after US companies bless my device? Outstanding move!
- tormeh 8mo agoI think this is more about fees than sovereignty.
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoIt can be both, the plumbing is straight forward, simply a matter of will to implement. UPI in India, Pix in Brazil, FedNow in the US, etc. Trimmings are things like paying via QR code and alias support (phone, email IDs). Pix had native alias support, Wero is alias support on top of SEPA Instant payment rails (with a ~ten second settlement SLA). This gets you to utility cost recovery fee structures and sovereignty over your payment infra, versus other countries controlling your value transfer capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/instant_payments/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/instant_payments/html/...
- microtonal 8mo agoThis is not a wallet (the name is a bit confusing). Wero (like iDEAL, which it is partly based on), is an online payment system directly backed by your bank account. This is an app that uses the Wero system for doing P2P payments (like Tikkie in The Netherlands). Most likely, Wero (like iDEAL) will also support alternative apps for P2P payments. Also, Wero will support in-store payments in the future, making Google Pay/Apple Pay unnecessary [1] unnecessary, which is a big win. [1] Strictly spoken it's unnecessary now as well, but then each bank needs to implement its own NFC app and most simply opt foor Google/Apple Pay.
- notorandit 8mo agoEurope? It's available only in Germany, Belgium and France. That are IN Europe but are not THE Europe. https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/37991694065809-Who-can-use-Wero https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/37991694065... I hope we'll get there soon.
- nicbou 8mo agoEvery once in a while, I check it out, and every time I am confused or disappointed. Don't we already have SEPA transfers? What benefits would this add? Why are they completely unable to pitch it to someone who's curious and receptive to the idea?
- hocuspocus 8mo agoP2P transfers are just a convenient feature, using SCT Inst behind the scenes. Pan-European payments are the bigger deal.
- nicbou 8mo agoThe first sentence is gibberish to me. The second one makes me want to ask the same question again: don't we have SEPA transfers already?
- hocuspocus 8mo agoTransfers and payments aren't the same thing.
- nicbou 8mo agoI do not understand your comments
- hocuspocus 8mo agoIf you can't be bothered to spend 10 seconds asking Google or your favorite LLM, I'm not sure why you come here to comment on the topic. In most cases, you can't pay a merchant using a bank transfer. Businesses and consumers need payment systems. This is not particularly hard to grasp.
- nicbou 8mo agoThere is no need to be rude. I am receptive to your argument and trying to understand you, but brevity is not to your advantage here. I can use Google but I do not even know what you are trying to say in the context of my original question. Communication requires both players to participate.
- pleurotus 8mo agoI think it's important to note—which isn't mentioned on their website at all, stupidly enough—that wero has two parts. The p2p payment, that you can see in the parent article. And the e-commerce functionality, which is based on the dutch iDeal. See https://sowieso.wero-wallet.eu/nl-en/ https://sowieso.wero-wallet.eu/nl-en/ Kinda odd that their marketing does nothing to clarify this...
- zb3 8mo agoMade in Europe, requires a smartphone controlled by US corporations violating DSA laws.. great.
- ninalanyon 8mo agoYou have to start somewhere.
- alde 8mo agoFyi, Wero only supports three countries: Belgium, France, and Germany.
- tefkah 8mo agowrong, also the netherlands
- tormeh 8mo agoNetherlands and Luxemburg joining soon, along with what I believe is Austria's biggest bank. But yes, hardly a pan-European project.
- cyberpunk 8mo agoWith NL that’s fully 40% of the population of the eu states. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either.
- shabatar 8mo agoAlready quite much if we add the Netherlands, yes :)
- tormeh 8mo agoI really hope we can get Wero cards at some point. I don't like my ability to pay for things to depend on my phone's battery.
- dadoum 8mo agoCan anyone explain me exactly why it is a suitable alternative to VISA and Mastercard (and why people were waiting for it). I am trying to understand the full picture here, so multiple things come to my mind. First, SEPA instant payments already exist and are really instant up to a certain amount, and I am guessing that Wero builds on top of that a sort of identity layer, to sidestep the whole IBAN thing. But it is likely more than a SEPA alias, since it was supposedly hard to set-up. Second, VISA and Mastercard are worldwide payment networks (or rather, they each operate payment networks with various names?). But I am failing to grasp what's hard to reproduce here too. I heard that in Europe there were only a few national alternatives, like Carte Bancaire or Girocard, but why? Is it just because banks can't agree on the design of an alternate network? But all the fees associated with using VISA or Mastercard should be a big enough incentive to push something else. (basically what's a payment network?) And lastly, why are all the new (free) digital banks (néobanques as we call them here) relying on either Mastercard or VISA and never on Carte Bancaire for example, while it generally offers lower processing fees (and that they can be cobranded). I think I am missing a lot of context, and I asked LLMs a while ago about these but themselves don't really explain what is the infrastructure needed to operate such a network.
- cyberpunk 8mo agoSepa-inst requires 10 seconds or less end to end, this isn’t as easy as it sounds to implement, but we are kind of there. The problem is how do you initiate this payment? Some kind of scannable code or nfc interaction seems to be the missing part. I’d also like to see some kind of physical card also work for those who don’t want or are unable to have an attestable device with them.
- WA 8mo agoI‘d love if every receipt had an EPC QR code on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code You scan it with your banking app and have all the details. But it’s not super seamless. If you find this code on a website on your phone, you have to screenshot the code and load it in the app. Would be nice if there was some kind of deep-link standard.
- tom1337 8mo agowould be cool if they'd also only be using Europe tools for hosting but so far I've seen Atlassian Statuspage, Zendesk, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Matomo Cloud (which uses AWS), Digital Ocean and Google Ads.
- sunaookami 8mo agoThe problems with Wero is that it needs a linked phone number and nobody can answer what happens if you link two bank accounts from different banks to the same phone number (is this even supported? Why do I NEED to link my phone number?). Also, every bank needs to manually support Wero and when you want to pay online you need to scan a QR code with your phone (yes even on your desktop) and approve it inside your banking app which makes it way slower than just using PayPal or Google/Apple Pay. It's astounding how EU bureaucrats came up with "PayPal but worse" over 25 years after PayPal was founded.
- cyberpunk 8mo agophone number was a poor choice, agreed. Identifier should just be some guid attached to your bank account of choice and you get one for every device / card. I don’t imagine that’s so very hard to implement later though.
- microtonal 8mo agoEU bureaucrats have nothing to do with this. They are pushing the Digital Euro instead. Wero is an initiative from a group of European banks united in EPI (European Payment Initiative). The tech is partially based on the Dutch iDEAL (which EPI acquired a few years ago). iDEAL has been around in The Netherlands for 20 years and is used for most Dutch online payments (also supported by Shopify and Stripe) and P2P payments through Tikkie/betaalverzoek. The whole system is really nice and smooth and definitely much nicer than PayPal in many ways. Almost no online stores use Paypal here because iDEAL works so well. Given this history and the iDEAL people working there, I'm sure Wero will be fine after a few iterations.
- sunaookami 8mo agoEPI are still EU bureaucrats ;) They are supported by the ECB and EU Commission and the ECB also pushes for the digital euro. That's good to know that Wero for online shops is "just" iDEAL rebranded, that was news to me. There is an info page here: https://sowieso.wero-wallet.eu/nl-en/consumer https://sowieso.wero-wallet.eu/nl-en/consumer
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- fbn79 8mo agoI wish you the best of luck! Let me know when it works in all the countries where VISA is available so I can switch to this solution!
- amelius 8mo agoSpeaking of payment methods, anyone else noticed that Pcbway stopped accepting credit cards? What is going on?
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- amarant 8mo agoAt first glance this seems similar to swish, but for a different part of Europe. Is it? I wonder if there will be interoperability between them, that would be pretty sweet
- disgruntledphd2 8mo agoThe goal here is to provide a payments system that works across all of the EU. Right now, it's not there but hopefully it will get there eventually. Basically it's a swish/ideal etc equivalent for the entire EU.
- amarant 8mo agoOh that's even better! Sweet!
- zokier 8mo agoI think this press release adds much needed context: https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/bancomat-bizum-epi-sibs-and-vipps-mobilepay-sign-mou-to-accelerate-the-rollout-of-sovereign-pan-european-payment-solutions https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/bancomat-bizum-epi-sibs... Especially these parts: > The cooperation builds on the success of existing solutions, connecting them via a central hub to create a truly pan-European experience for cross-border payments. > European consumers will continue using their current preferred solution, now with broader European reach > The cooperation is based on a central interoperability hub, operated by a future central entity jointly established by the partners. So it is unlikely that Wero will be the single solution for entire Europe. Instead it is one of many solutions that hopefully will interoperate in the future. But we are still in the MoU phase only, so lets see what happens...
- Baguette5242 8mo agoIt’s not like this issue had been solved like… what… 15 freaking years ago in China. The fact that this is shown as a « big step forward » is a a great example of how much the EU is lagging behind. It’s honestly quite sad. Anyway, let’s wait and see, I already used Wero, it works OK, I don’t really get what the difference is between this and instant bank transfers but again, let’s wait and see.
- Onavo 8mo agoHey don't blame Europe, they are hardly an expert on « ̶b̶i̶g̶ ̶s̶t̶e̶p̶ ̶great leaps forward »
- tmtvl 8mo agoIt disgusts me that there's no consumer protection law against 'if you want to use our service you must have an Android or iPhone'. Blue Bikes (rental bicycles) also have this problem and there it's possibly even worse because they used to have a card.
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- jasonvorhe 8mo agoIf you moved sats (you know, Satoshis, smaller unit of Bitcoin) using Lightning within seconds without a bank account, this is nothing but a joke. KYC, proprietary, part of a broader strategy of having Europeans rely more on banks and digital id: https://epicompany.eu/ https://epicompany.eu/ I'll pass.
- idrissbellil 8mo agoyep, sats, or move 20 million usd in 5 seconds with LTC and pay 0.75 usd in fees, Kaspa aiming for sub-second transactions and still PoW plus highly scalable and turstless, but hey install this KYC garbage on top of broken system, supported in 3 countries and you could get banned for no reason because your safety. The meme goes, if they could read they would be very upset.
- sph 8mo agoIt's good to have an alternative to fall back on when inevitably cash will be outlawed in Europe and we will need to solve the problem of paying for illegal stuff (drugs, bribes, etc.) Lightning will come to the rescue.
- postepowanieadm 8mo agoThere's also BLIK - alive and kicking. But since it's made in the EEU it's ignored in Brussels:)
- kkfx 8mo agoAs an EU Citizen I do not want to switch from a proprietary fintech to another, I want FREEDOM. So, I have nothing against FLOSS cryptos, but I see exactly no reason to choose a company instead of another, especially given the record of EU illegal size of funds for anyone the EU Commission dislike, not differently than USA or Canada.
- Palmik 8mo agoI would pay for a solution that aggregates these alternative payment systems that aren't tied to VISA and Mastercard and their rules. Wero, RuPay, WeChat Pay / AliPay, Crypto (through 3p like coinbase or directly), etc. And handles them in nice and unified API, with hooks for subscriptions, etc. (taking into account that some payment methods do not support recurring payments, so there should be some hook to send an email to the customer to renew manually, etc.)
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