Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

JumpCrisscross

Banks in Spain, Italy and Portugal are joining what this article describes as France’s Wero system [1]. («L'initiative française Wero».) Focus this year is on P2P transfers. Commerce is targeted for 2027. Given EuroPA has done a token amount of transactions to date, I’m not sure anyone should hold their breaths. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)

gsky

I'm pretty sure American gov won't react kindly

reddalo

Too bad that, for Italy, BancomatPay joined instead of Satispay, an app that's actually used (especially in the North). Almost nobody uses BancomatPay.

nwatson

Equivalent PIX is very popular in Brazil for instant payments.

petcat

> A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment. Have you seen the new money app? It's on Tubu. It's on Weeno. I'm on Dippy but my friend is on Poob. Poob has it for you.

HelloUsername

Source was posted back in February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861789

wink

Totally misleading. Without reading all of it: MAYBE it means: it is/will be enabled for 130m people. And even those of us who have activated it, have hardly used it for the most part, or hve concerns.

spockz

Pretty much was already available via SEPA. We had a similar system in the Netherlands called ideal which has now been subsumed by Wero to join an European alternative. In the end the idea is simple. All participating bank accounts have lorum/nostrum accounts for the pairs. Whenever the Wero transaction succeeds the money is wired internally directly. I’m not sure whether this mechanism will be replaced by SEPA direct debit entirely.

epolanski

As political instability has shown, it is a bad idea to have all your payments go through a single, weaponizable, failure point in New York. Europe needs to be functionally as independent as possible.

hiroto_lemon

Wero rides on SEPA SCT Inst, already mandatory EU-wide. P2P will land fast; merchant displacement is hard because card interchange funds the chargeback layer SEPA doesn't replicate.

stldev

Tant mieux pour eux. I suppose some added sovereignty is to be expected when your closest ally extorts, threatens annexation and slams you with tariffs.

slau

Maybe the original source that the current article links to is a better link: https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/bancomat-bizum-epi-sibs...

trumbitta2

Spoiler: Europeans use whatever their banks provide.

mcv

Wero is basically an EU-wide version of the Dutch iDeal system, which in my opinion is the gold standard of how internet payment should work. I shouldn't have to fill in any card numbers on the site of the merchant (which is unsafe). Instead, the payment should redirect me to my bank, where I authorize the payment through my own bank's security system. I've always been annoyed by the need to type in sensitive card info on all sorts of merchant sites. I hope that with EU-wide use, Wero will receive much broader support now.

Shalomboy

I'm legitimately curious how these American payment companies held onto their worldwide dominance for so long. I'm used to seeing the sign at restaurants of all the other cards they accept, but for so long I've only ever seen Amex, Discover, Visa, and Mastercard in folks' hands.

baalimago

Good! Now please remove dependency of alphabet + apple for bank apps, and we're golden.

0xbadcafebee

Soon: "President Trump issued a new tariff today on all non-US payment systems, saying `We have the best protectionist economy in the world, it's really great`"

arpinum

This is the EU equivalent of Zelle, but pushing into merchant payments and owned and run by the banks. When the telcos tried to compete with the cloud providers by offering OpenStack they learned the business wasn't as simple as offering 10-15 services with some racks. I can imagine the same hidden complexity for payment rails On the other hand regulations have taken too much power away from merchants and Wero could succeed with more merchant friendly terms. They are doing 3-legged payments so they are not subject to as many European regulations as Visa/Mastercard.

skrebbel

I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you all that Wero is called Wero because Euro is pronounced "you-ro" and when you share your you-ro it becomes a we-ro.

nicholasbraker

I thought crypto would have solved this ;-)