This is coming on the heels of many 'domestic schemes' being deprecated. For example, in The Netherlands, all Maestro cards are being replace by Mastercard debit and Visa debit. The benefit is that bank cards will now work seamlessly internationally.
There's no technical reason why Maestro cards couldn't work internationally (and in fact, Brazil was also using Maestro), as it's just a subscheme of Mastercard, which itself conforms with EMV standards. The E- of EMV stands for 'Europay', a defunct european payment scheme.
The EMV standard is mandated in Europe, precisely to ensure competition of new multi-country schemes is possible, so this is a return to form.
It's just an attempt to extend Paylib, initiated by BNP Parisbas. Paylib is an attempt to compete with Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay with a 100% European solution.
But Paylib sucks. They came late to the market. Enrolment is difficult (you need account numbers and have to wait two days for validation). Payment is random and can take several days to announce that the recipient doesn't have Paylib or that their bank isn't a member. There are very few partners. Paylib has been used a lot for scams.
In contrast, Lydia (which was recently renamed sumeria), another French neobank initiative, is excellent. They started out as an online money pot service 13 years ago. Then they became a neobank. Registration is super simple and quick (scan you ID and the account is open in hours). They are compatible with google pay and amazon pay. They have a very effective instant transfer system with confirmation of receipt, payment by QR code, etc.. the fact that it's a separate account and confirmation requests are made on both sides, or even a physical check via a QR code, greatly limits scam attempts.
I paid for beers in a bar run by punks with it. That's the level of acceptability.
Wero comes too late, will probably be rubbish and will only concern a few large Western European banks.
Mildly amused that where the US is suing Visa for being a monopoly, it's the EU that's actually standing up a viable competitor for the problematic sector.
The EU actually believes in free markets, while the US tends to allow a single corporation or pair to "win" a market and exploit everyone thereafter.
The Visa/Mastercard duopoly also has a stranglehold on card payment in the EU, though. The big difference is that the EU primarily uses debit cards, which traditionally could not be used for online payment. Whereas the US could just use their credit cards for online payments (thus strengthening Visa's position), the EU banks were forced to develop their own online payment schemes. This made Visa irrelevant almost by accident.
All the "EU regulations prevent innovation" commentators suddenly in shambles.
US got Venmo(/paypal) though
Many if not most European countries also have their respective payment apps.
one example of a small european country is Switzerland, where a big part of the population uses TWINT. I can instantly send money to my friends, split bills, pay parking tickets etc.
Most big banks have their own TWINT apps, so that you don't even have to use it as a prepaid solution and it's instead directly linked to your bank account.
no idea if that's also how venmo/cashapp works.
They’re certainly going to try.
With SEPA framework Europe does not need any payment card processor anymore, you can settle any payment with instant and free wire transfer through the eurozone. It's not only the bank that are coming after Visa and Mastercard, it's the eurozone.
Ultimately the semantics of instant push payment transfers are pretty different from card purchases.
Chargebacks for instance are a key protection which I have made use of multiple times. There’s no such option available with bank transfers. The card networks are typically the ones who handle dispute arbitration and various other issues between merchants and card issuers/cardholders.
Those kinds of features mean that people are comfortable using their bank/credit cards, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be okay if someone steals the card or a merchant makes an error or defrauds them.
There are all sorts of protections available to merchants like card holds which make buying a hotel room much more seamless.
Sepa direct debit has chargebacks.
Yes, but it’s only an 8 week window and there’s no dispute arbitration process, which is actually bad for merchants too.
>Chargebacks for instance are a key protection which I have made use of multiple times. There’s no such option available with bank transfers.
In case someone doesn't understand why this is the case:
Banks don't really care about your money.
Banks really care about their money.
When you buy something with a debit card, you are spending your money.
When you buy something with a credit card, you are spending the bank's money.
Yes, banks tout zero fraud liability with your debit charges just like credit charges; no, their enthusiasm is /dev/null compared to credit charges.
This is largely true, and it’s codified into law in some places (see s.75 in the UK), however I would say that the protections provided by most major banks on debit card purchases are actually pretty good. The chargeback process for most issuers is very similar or the same. You should use a credit card because you have stronger legal protections, but it’s not like most banks will screw you just for using a debit card.
It's a tradeoff, for example the German Girocard network is fundamentally built on top of SEPA so it is very low cost.
But that also means that it does not support features that credit card networks support like chargebacks or 3DS. For that reason it also doesn't work online.
This is a space that a lot of bank transfer payment schemes fit into: low cost, fast settlement, high risk.
SEPA payments are not free between different banks in all countries. There can be charges of 4€ within the same country, even for small amounts.
Instant SEPA is free for me with my Austrian Erste Bank account but €1.50 with my easyBank account.
Interestingly, Erste have it off by default in the mobile app so I always have to turn it on for each transfer.
Non-free transfers between those banks can take about 1 hour but if too late in the day then 1 business day.
I've been paying like 0.9eur fixed fee. However often they are free. I don't know what exactly the logic is with the fees. Anyway I wouldn't see it as a suitable method for small retail payments.
Perhaps you need to update your contract or something, SEPA for eur-to-eur wires are free in most of banks.
The shops around here barely support card payments, I'm not expecting them to do direct bank transfers for a single freshly baked bread roll.
That sounds like nonsense. How is sepä going to replace my payment card? I haven't seen a single sepa branded payment card around. Visa and MasterCard are all about the cards, SEPA is for money transfers from your bank account and has nothing to do with cards.
I’ve never had a free SEPA transfer. Where is that a thing?
Literally every bank to bank transfer in Europe? Edit: apparently there are some complexities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area (sees Charges) but personally I've never paid a single cent either
Yeah, it's a bit of a mess.
https://wise.com/help/articles/2956754/what-are-sepa-transfe...
> However, while banks shouldn’t charge for receiving SEPA payments, unfortunately there is a very small number that may still do so.
I can also confirm for example that (despite the UK still being in SEPA), wire transfers of Euro from Unicredit in Italy are getting extra charges when sent to a british IBAN (Unicredit is charging the sending side).
It’s like the main feature of a SEPA transfer, is that it’s free.
It was never free or instant. It only works from 9-15 on workdays and not on weekends. Also if there are holidays in eu also doesn't work for domestic transfers. Easter is fun whe it stops for 4 days even though country has only 3 state holidays during those times. Costs from 25-40 cents per domestic transaction or 7-17 euro per over border one. Depending on the bank.
It takes around an hour or some days over border for transfer to go through.
Maybe you think of sepa instant which is supported by some banks. Very new. Mostly used for people to people transfers. Some shops are starting to support it. It is actually instantaneous anc works weekends. It seems to be mostly free.
In addition, SEPA was never free. So OP is also wrong there.
The regulation only stipulates that the bank's fees for a payment into another SEPA country/bank must be the same as into the same bank or the same country. I.e. no payment fee discrimination across SEPA: if my Czech bank X charges me Y for a local EUR payment into X, it must also charge me Y for the same EUR payment into Italy, for example.
Would any bank charge their customers Y>0 like that? Yes they would. For example the Bank of Cyprus (in Cyprus, which is in both EU & SEPA) will charge you 6 EUR for a SEPA payment of 1200 EUR if the sender is a physical person, and 10 EUR if legal person [0]. Far from "free".
[0] https://www.bankofcyprus.com/globalassets/cyprus/org_methods... [PDF]
> Visa and Mastercard moved swiftly to suspend their operations, preventing overseas payments by Russian cardholders and halting foreigners from making transactions on Russian soil.
> Russia’s central bank, ready for this sort of crisis, had previously created the National Payment Card System to process transactions domestically, even if the cards carried a Visa or Mastercard logo. This workaround meant consumers could continue to make payments locally after the invasion.
Not knowing much about how Visa/MC works internally, how is this technically possible? I thought both companies had most of the control over their networks, and if Visa/MC says "Charge rejected", then that's the outcome. But here it seems like the Central Bank was able to still be able to process the cards at least domestically, but unclear exactly how.
Sounds good all around, the only thing that bothers me is that I will have to give my phone number to recieve a payment ? You can set an alias even in PayPal
It sounds good in theory, seeing it Sweden any time soon seems unlikely since our banks got together to do their own thing a long time ago, but we’ll see.
However, I would like to have a word with whoever was responsible for their website (https://wero-wallet.eu), it looks like they’re pushing galaxy gas to kids… not everything has to be overly branded, especially not finance.
The web site has a great design, reminiscent of both comic books and fast-food menus. High contrast, legible if quirky fonts, all this should contribute to a mass appeal.
(Edit: typos)
I don't like the fonts, maybe quirky is not good for finance.
Yes, IMHO, the idea that it's not the high-brow, high-ceremony, high-stakes finance is an important part of the message. "Look, it's a simple daily tool, a degree in accounting is not required."
I like the high contrast actually, that aspect reminds me of gov.uk
High contrast is great, the typography and visual language is what irks me. What does space ships have to do with financial safety and why do they feel to tell me what money is used for? ”Buying popcorn”, yes you can buy things with money.
Things like forcing users to download the privacy policy (true.pdf) also seems weird, display it in the browser…
It feels like a marketing campaign site from early 2010 and I just think it’s a very strange language for something as important and relevant as financial transactions.
Lovely initiative, really.
But they need to change that name, Wero sounds lame.
It's not easy coming up with a name that sounds at least somewhat OK in >24 languages.
Rename to Uero. It's like Euro, but with a twist.
There are many of these new mobile payment thingies in the EU, the big question is are we going to get any interoperability between them?
I f you live in one country mainly, it shouldn't be a problem - you just use whatever mobile payment scheme is the most popular there. When you travel, you still need an interoperable option - also because many mundane tasks like renting a car or booking a hotel typically require a card rather than just a payment. It will take decades for this to change.
There seems no mention of what they plan to do with the "credit" part of a credit card?
Most people in Europe don't rely on credit card debt. We buy stuff only if we have the money in our bank account. And if we don't, we just overdraft our accounts.
20 years ago, credit cards were a thing that mostly people who travelled a lot had. Then people got credit cards so they could buy stuff online, but a few years ago debit mastercard / visa replaced maestro, and we no longer need credit cards for online shopping.
So people stopped getting credit cards.
This is a payments system (debit card). Slightly different but more popular in debt-averse countries like Germany.
In the Nordics we have VIPPS
Which merged with MobilePay.
Side note: I stopped using it (in Finland) in the beginning of the year when they launched their new app that exposed users full names (including middle names). On the old MobilePay you were able to set an alias. "For our safety" of course.
according to their website, 80% of retail banking in Belgium, France and Germany... for me that's far from Europe.
France and Germany alone are 40% of the EU economy and both have huge political influence on the EU. I wouldn't expect any nascent tech to be adopted by the entire EU any time soon but this is nice to see.
Wero is based on the Dutch IDEAL system. Because the Dutch already have a good system, they are not joining right away, but at a later time.
The most baffling part of it is that at first glance it seems nothing like the Dutch IDEAL system.
The IDEAL system is a replacement for online C2B payments. Rather than entering an incredibly insecure credit card number, the storefront redirects you to your bank, where you safely log in, confirm payment, and get redirected back to the store. It's essentially OAuth for payment. The only annoying part is having to manually select your bank, but even that is now a non-issue with a single unified QR code you can scan in any mobile banking app.
On the other hand, https://wero-wallet.eu/ tells me that Wero is a C2C system, so basically an alternative to Paypal, Venmo, Tikkie, or all the bank-initiated payment request implementations we've seen pop up over the last few years. You can send and receive money via your mobile phone number. So how is this supposed to be like IDEAL?
Reading the FAQs it feels like nothing more than a strictly-worse version of Tikkie, but potentially with an added attack vector for your bank account. In other words, I see very little reason to switch to it.
There are countries in the EU which don't even use the Euro, but that doesn't stop business from happening, does it?
Imo, you only need France, NL, Italy and Germany. Maybe Sweden, Spain, Poland and Austria too. Then you've got enough of a market economy to justify needing a separate card processor. I'm surprised they haven't gotten into this earlier. But then again, it's the EU, they're laggards through and through.
This is where most things in the EU start, including the EU itself.
'Wero'?
how is it pronounced, like 'weirdo'?
Like always, as the problem is so obvious, the interesting question is why it has not been solved yet ("US neutral global payment alternative for Visa/Mastercard").
There are three problems
- Hometurf competition
- Politics
- Technical skill
But in the case of the EU it is mostly the first. All "local" (read: national) banks have created their own payment standards to compete with Visa/Mastercard. Everyone wants their standard to be adopted, instead of the competitor bank alternatives.
Then there is rollout. Banks are very traditional organisations and cannot think startups how to get adoption. They want adoption through regulation "force everyone to use our system." They cannot get natural adoption. If you want adoption, make system open as possible, take a page from Linux playbook. Give open source terminals and libraries to everyone and you will have adoption.
As discussed in Hacker News before, there are also reasons why the EU lacks top software development skill, which is currently naturally attracted to the US. Not as an individuals, you still get top EU programmers, but as a geographic. This is due to software engineer not being prestigious job in many EU countries.
The step further for this is open ledger, which comes to politics. Even in the EU we are worried that if someone runs this system, the "evil" countries like Hungary will exploit it, suck in all your personal data and sell to Russians.
Only if there were credible neutral open digital ledger.
N26 (Berlin), Revolut (London), and Trade Republic (Berlin) are all fintech startups based in Europe (Europe != EU, as per North America != USA). This story is mainly about the EU, but the UK was a non-trivial part of the EU tech scene before Brexit and Revolut was part of that scene and has offices in Lithuania and got a proper bank license in the EU three years before it got one in the UK.
> The step further for this is open ledger, which comes to politics. Even in the EU we are worried that if someone runs this system, the "evil" countries like Hungary will exploit it, suck in all your personal data and sell to Russians.
One or two problems there, depending on how you split them:
1) To avoid your data being sold to the Russians, you'll give it away for free?
2) The very fact that bank ledgers are not open, prevents one country — Hungary in your example — from having access to all of them.
I’m not completely in agreement with many of your takes as I think things are often more complicated than how you outline them. EU decision making is long, not necessarily hard because of local interests but because it’s how EU diplomacy works. The disadvantage is that local countries often adopt their own standards and are then slow to adopt the EU ones when they eventually come out. It does happen over time, however, it’s just slow because the local businesses aren’t really going to do it until you force them to do so with legislation. But politicians rarely fight on behalf of their local solutions, often because those solutions ended up costing 10x of what was originally sold and usually taking 5+ years extra. It’s not like you’re wrong though. Except for this part.
> This is due to software engineer not being prestigious job in many EU countries.
When polled software engineering ranks among doctors, actual engineers and TikTok stars as what young people want to be. Though to be fair, software development is going down as people have realised it isn’t a get-rich quick scheme. Anyway. In the wider society Software Engineering is one of the higher regarded and prestigious fields in many European countries. If what you mean is getting recognition by the HN styled crowd then you are correct, but there is a lot of Italian, French, German, Polish and so on, speaking talent you won’t ever hear about in the English focused news. In fact a lot of the top tech talent is not going to the US but rather places like Dubai, Singapore or China because those places pay more. There are obviously people who head to the US but I’d still argue that it’s about money and not because they weren’t valued. You would see a lot of EU professionals migrate for pay if they could. Because EU is just more mediocre. That is not the right word, what I mean is that the sealing is lower. The floor is also often higher, but if you’re in a position where you can triple your already top level pay, then you’re probably going to take it. Now if you mean prestige as in pay, then yes.
> "evil" countries like Hungary
Governments, not countries. Hungary is a country like any other, it got a crazy power-hungry leader and just like all authoritarians he is right-leaning and Putin-friendly. But the whole country is not like that, and sooner or later this shit-show will end.
They voted for him and they'll vote for more like him. Related: actual Nazism is on the rise in Germany, with the neonazi party recently winning control of two state governments.
From the title I thought this would be an European UnionPay, but it's just another European Zelle.
What's the difference between UnionPay and Zelle?