I don’t see how breaking up with US payment systems is a problem, let alone a 24 trillion problem. Sounds like something good. The article (don’t laugh, but I have read it) states the same.
I feel like whoever wrote the headline fucked it up, because the article reads more like that Visa/MasterCard payments are a 24 trillion problem, and wero is a potential solution.
This guy read the article before he commented, everyone laugh at him!
You’re not better: you have read a comment in full before answering to it. Shameful!
Wait, you guys can read?
Thanks for asking, the weather is pretty nice today.
I can’t even write
And my axe!
Am so better!
edit: tldr
With this economy!
Ha ha!
Because its relative. Its good for the EU because it’s taking that market back, its bad for the US because its losing that market.
It’s a problem for visa and mastercard, I guess 🤷♀️ certainly not for Europe…
When? This has been happening for many years now. Slower than turtle.
Yes… When please :(
I mea, they did release Wero
Which does nothing for point of sale at present, it is only vaguely ‘planned’.
In Europe we didn’t really rely on credit cards for online payments anyway. It was an option but far from the only one. The problem was just that each country had their own system which was a PITA. Wero unifies those. Handy for webmasters, but geopolitically not a gamechanger.
The big problem is PoS payments where MC/Visa are king and basically have a duopoly. I don’t know why Wero didn’t start with the elephant in the room.
Yes, Wero is there it is made up of consortium of banks and not unified interface. Also, the adoption itself is very poor.
Where? On what platform? How can one install and use such a thing?
I’m gonna disappoint you now.
- Only some EU countries have joined so far, and I believe not all banks for those either. Here’s a list
- You can use either your bank app or the Wero app, available on Play Store or App Store. No Wero without a Google/Apple approved phone and app, unless there’s a bank that provides an APK file and doesn’t rely on Play Services
- You can’t use it to pay in person yet, it’s more of a PayPal replacement than a Visa/MasterCard replacement
- If/when the point of sale payments become a thing, it will be via a QR. No plastic card you can use when your phone battery is flat. I have no idea if they’re planning on changing that.
Personally I can’t use it, it’s not available in my country. I can however send people money instantly by doing a SEPA Instant transfer, the only “difficult” part about is needing their IBAN, which they can just copy and paste into a messenger app or send via a text if it’s a stranger (like the one or two times I’ve bought a car off a stranger via bank transfer - which mostly there’s no need to here as the Estonian transport authority actually has a secure method for that which guarantees that the car’s ownership is transferred when the money is transferred - and works via a bank link)
There’s been talk of an European payment card system too, but usually people just go “well the individual countries already have their systems so there’s no need, Wero is all you need”. Which I disagree with, because 1) many EU countries do NOT have a payment card system 2) those systems require you to use your card in your own country mostly. If there was a big EU-wide system, it would more than likely also be accepted in non-EU countries in the future and we could have European cards with the Visa/MasterCard experience where you just go to pretty much any country in the world and your card JUST WORKS. Till that happens, you still need to own a Visa or Mastercard if you want to go abroad, though luckily you can just have a virtual card for that nowadays.
TL;DR: It currently has like two use cases which are already mostly handled well enough by normal bank transfers, which are instant up to like 10k EUR IIRC (might’ve been more, might’ve been less) and available much more widely. Though if wero offers consumer protections, it MAY be a bit better in online purchases than a normal transfer - but as long as you only buy from reputable sites, that’s not too big of an issue anyway, and there’s three and a half online stores that let you buy using wero apparently (this is just what I’ve heard, can’t confirm - it’s not available in my country after all)
And there are dozens of websites that accept it. Dozens!
Fund tranfering should be a gov service provided at cost and maintained as a partnership between nations to make commerce easy for their citizens.
Profit shouldn’t even be a concern.
For bank transfers this is already a thing, it’s called SEPA. Transfers are instant and free (to the user at least, no idea if the banks have to pay).
But yes, there should be an equivalent thing for in-person payments too.
This is the only correct way. An EU-funded open-data, open-government, open-source Project with the whole purpose of building a non-profit alternative to Visa or even PayPal
Will never happen though :-(
(gov provided) services should never be for profit
government = people who live in the country. So government services are literally by the people for the people. trying to profit from them is like having a parasite.
But think of the poor banks and card companies!!
Brazilian Pix be like:
A few years back I remember who I believe was a commission leader in Brussels commenting on Pix along the lines of: Pix has given banking access to many Brazilians. We already have a very high quota in Europe, so we will not need an equivalent system… I don’t think there’s much interest in the political sphere for a publicly run solution like this.
Things have changed now and Brussels is slowly working on a digital euro.
Pix had anything to do with banking access. You need to have a bank account to have access to pix. Pix is a money transfer system, that is free for individual users and extremely cheap for companies, controlled by the central bank that works instantly 24/7.
Edit: is also mandatory for banks and financial institutions so everyone has it
I’m aware. The difference in fees compared to MC/Visa for example is staggering, but no surprise if the infrastructure isn’t profit-oriented. I was just making the point, that the ones responsible to make it happen in Europe are making excuses for why it won’t be done. It is true though, that around the time of Pix being implemented there was a boom in financial inclusion in Brazil. But that might have just as well been because of the pandemic and Pix just made it easier for everyone.
Hopefully, Europe will offer options to Americans. I want to enjoy my perverse media, and to oppose christofascist organizations.
problem
Slop title.
The solutions are ready, super cheap, and the transition period gradual & managed.It is a revenue problem for MasterCard & Visa, bcs no more free monies for them.
And no more data as well. Don’t forget about the consumer data.
Oh, yes, absolutely a valid point!
That has enormous consequences, third parties & data brokers are making a killing & worsen our society.
fuck em
Wero lets users send money using just a phone number
No, Wero lets users send money using a smartphone. If there’s no desktop interface (like Poland’s BLIK) I’m gonna be disappointed. I know India’s UPI runs on HMD dumbphones, would be nice to have something like this.
Well, it’s a law within the EU that instant payments need to be fulfilled within 10 seconds. If you select that after logging into your bank it shouldn’t be an issue, though it should be the automatic option, IMO; you shouldn’t have to enable it, but rather disable it if you don’t wanna send money instantly, and IMO banks should already know this. My only gripe is that most banks in Europe don’t have a proper “user account” system. It’s more of an address book as opposed to a contacts list. I’d prefer pressing on my peer’s name through a search function on the home screen, than needing to select his name from a list after pressing the specific button for it in the menu to send money, which I’ve already had to press another specific button for; just to reduce the steps needed to send money. I don’t see why that is not doable.
Knowing the EU and my country, the reason is “security” by difficulty. Boomer-ass continent.
I’d prefer pressing on my peer’s name through a search function on the home screen, than needing to select his name from a list after pressing the specific button for it in the menu to send money, which I’ve already had to press another specific button for; just to reduce the steps needed to send money. I don’t see why that is not doable.
Revolut has this, if you trust them with your money. I’ve had no issues over the last 2 years that I’ve used it, but apparently not everyone can say the same.
That’s a question for your bank. Wero is a system designed for mobile payments between banks, but in 95% of all cases it’s your bank implementing it for the user.
No, you need a smart phone for UPI.
So it doesn’t work in every dumb phone. You need specific devices or smartphone.
The article omits that Wero is running on top of AWS. So still the same problem, just slightly lower in the stack.
Yes but this is a simple migration away. The system itself and its adoption are far bigger barriers.
AWS
Also, when Wero started, Trump hadn’t started to set the world on fire yet, so the geopolitical angle was far less pronounced. Until Jan 2025, hosting an EU service on AWS was not controversial.
It’s easier to replace AWS with a European alternative, than Visa or Mastercard. So the problem is smaller.
True, and I also did not mean to let better be the enemy of good. Just that we’re not in the clear yet.
Centralized problems are generally easier to solve than distributed problems. Depending on their architecture moving to an EU cloud provider could range from tricky but manageable to very painful , but it’s a centralized IT problem that can be attacked and solved. Getting every retail vendor to support Wero is much harder, and is being solved apparently.
Valid point.
But technically an easier transition to own solutions at some point.Wero has its roots before the overall critical industry ‘digital independence’ got enough attention (in the recent year), it was more about solving a specific duopoly (that a lot of banks & startups started solving anyway, just way more fragmented).
I don’t know much about the payment processors but I would assume Visa and MasterCard run on their own hardware? Or are they also tied to a cloud provider these days?
From a few IPs that I checked, all were served by ASN2559 which would belong to Visa directly. They seem to have a lot of services according to shodan
MasterCard is ASN26380 and has a smaller footprint on shodan, but still many hits
So both seem have their own data centers. Doesn’t mean, that they won’t use AWS/Azure/GCP/… if they see a benefit.
While true, the AWS infrastructure in Europe is somewhat sovereign from the parent company and under stricter regulation and oversight. Granted, it’s not a perfect solution but a good one for the moment.
That’s a lie, just marketing. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Fuck Visa and Fuck Mastercard, they have no business dictating what people are allowed to buy. Just process the fucking payment.
Even without them dictating that having absolute core infrastructure privately owned (and in a foreign country at that) is insane.
Not to mention them being profit driven & expensive.
I’ve been using Wero for a while. What’s missing are vendors that accept it online, also when hiring a car.
That is somewhat unsurprising since it is a rebranding of the Dutch iDeal system which now is being rolled out elsewhere in the EU.
I hope Wero becomes a EU standard. Sadly our banks have their own system Flik bu the issue is you literally cannot use it to pay anywhere. But they refuse tp accept wero due to having their own system.
I would much prefer a digital euro based on GNU Taler, but I guess Wero might at least be better than the status quo
I am conflicted on the digital euro. But a mastercard/visa alternative is 100% needed
It’s pretty much clear that it will not. Wero was late and most countries already have their own systems. They all signed an agreement last year to work on integrations. Wero will not replace all of them. Which is good because Wero is controlled mostly by German and French banks.
Well that would work as well. But afaik our current banks have not joined any integration programs it was just a few nations that did. Bit in the end if they all integrate and I am able to use our own system to pay in most pf the EU I don’t really care. As long as it works.
Afaik there is a schedule, atm it’s not EU wide yet.
I’m sure there will be a wide support fairly soon (
2027?oh, it’s already in all the countries they opted in - and it’s per county, not per bank, eg Revolut), especially as Wero gets more adopted for all the things. It’s prob already the biggest of them with 50m users.These local solutions (from banks or startups) will get integrated into the system (imho) as intermediaries offering some additional value (idk, credit payments or whatever).
I hope they do. I wanna be able to start doing online payment via one of these systems
In what country are you?
Slovenia
From what I see it’s not part of EuroPA. I think this is up to date:
So this will cooperate with Germany, France and Belgium which have Wero. Will be interesting to see what other countries will do.
I’m in Romania, and I have never heard of Blik. Maybe it’s behind Revolut’s instant payments or something?
There is a domestic instant payment solution - RoPay - but I’ve never actually used it; my bank does occasionally remind me it exists but I’ve never seen a merchant that accepted it. I would say Revolut’s solution I have started to notice - I’ve used it to pay for flights with WizzAir, for example.
I am sincerely hoping they do cooperate.
Honestly I think long term the digital euro will be the killer even if it takes longer than Wero. Wero is nice in the meantime, adoption will probably take till end of the year and next year tho.
It’s getting there. Lots of online stores are looking into it now that more banks joined.
Where do we find it? I looked and it’s not on Fdroid or Play Store. Am I blind?
You don’t need a specific app for it. It works by sending a payment link, then you finish the transaction in your own banking environment.
I realised my mistake. This is about payment processors like Visa, Stripe, whatever else, not banks themselves.
I got a bit mind-boggled :-)
a $24 trillion problem for Visa and Mastercard maybe
It’s a $24 trillion opportunity, that Americans are gonna lose.
It’s a serious problem, but not for Europe. Fuck US megacorps.
Good, as an american, fuck em. I cant wait to see the US crash and burn.
You won’t have to wait very long
Yeah I just worry about the power vacuum left over once this bitch crumbles
If my country still exists in 2028 there may be hope yet
Unfortunately dying empires don’t go down quietly
Why? I don’t understand your perspective here. Shouldn’t your interest lie with the country you live in?
Yeah it would be if my country had anything worth saving. The US is an international cess-pit that’s rotting everything it touches. I’ve been lower middle class to broke all my life so this shit collapsing is just another day. I feel bad for the children and elderly but overall the people who will get hurt deserve to have their worldviews shatter while the US crumbles under its own cancerous despotic weight. Too many people in my country are too comfortable sitting idly by while we rape and rob the global south and its time for that to end.
Europe just seems to be making all the right moves. Made apple go usb-c. This. Privacy laws. And more.
Some right moves, sure.
Good that the article points out that the US and Chinese providers are already fighting the European alternatives. By occupying other layers of the stack, rendering European digital payment sovereignty impossible. High time to accelerate this!
