Berliners will soon have to pay fees and other payments to the administration via the payment system Wero. This was decided by the digital committee of the House of Representatives, according to a report by Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB).
Wero – a combination of We and Euro – is a digital payment service that allows money to be transferred by providing a mobile phone number or an email address. It is intended to be positioned against US payment services such as Paypal.
I already used it in Belgium though…? “Pushed by Germany” is a bold statement when the technology comes from iDeal/Bancontact which are Dutch and Belgian respectively and France is also a very large economy in the mix. Don’t forget about Luxembourg as well. Benelux+FR+DE is hardly an ignorable market. France is already abandoning its existing solution for Wero. That’s always been the plan.
Do you care to source your claims? My understanding both the EuroPA and EPI are a private agreement between banks, but only the latter has received explicit backing from the European Commission. The EuroPA does not seem nearly as ambitious and only seeks to streamline existing national SEPA-based online payments (unclear to me what that means exactly in practice), which is a nice short-term vision for sovereignty but probably not where the EU will want to be 5 or 10 years from now. The big selling point of Wero is that you can be shown a QR code and use it to pay easily and instantly with extremely low fees, regardless of your bank.
You’re right, it’s also France and Benelux. It’s just my gut feeling that Germany is behind the PR push. Other countries had similar solutions for years, many of them allowing you to pay online and in physical stores but I never saw anyone mention them as independent EU solutions. Now Wero comes which is basically the same, just a solution created by banks, and I see everywhere how European it is and how everyone should use it. It looked strange to me from the very beginning. How were they expecting all the banks in Spain for example to ditch Bizum they work on for years and move to something they don’t control?
From what I see the entire history is very complicated with multiple splits and mergers but basically it’s just private banks competing between themselves. Why did European Commission back EPI and not EuroPA? Again, it just my gut feeling but I’m guessing it’s because Germany and France pushed for it, not because Wero is better or covers more people.
Anyway, my main point was that they signed a deal last year so it’s pretty much clear now they will work together to cover all of EU instead of competing. So current solutions under EuroPA will stay where they are, the banks will not switch to Wero. We can stop pushing Wero as the pan-European solution and focus on integrations. Personally, the ability to send money to a bank in another country is not that important to me. It’s the ability to pay locally, online and in stores that’s matters.
Wero is not “something the banks don’t control”. It’s a SEPA-based standard, implemented by the participating banks. It originated with Dutch/Belgian technology and banking markets and Germany and France joined because their sorry asses didn’t have anything better so it’s a pure upgrade for them.
EuroPA is trying to work with fragmented markets, Wero is trying to establish a new standard. I fail to see EuroPA as anything other than a stepping stone to an eventually unified standard. Having a single currency but noeasy and practical way of spending it in a Austrian or Spanish online shop without going through American banks is an absolutely bonkers situation.
I mean that Spanish bank don’t control it. With Bizum they can decide what to do. By switching to Wero they would basically have to implement whatever German and French banks tell them to. Imagine Wero decides to deprecate something or update the protocol by the end of the year. Suddenly you have bunch of work to do because EPI said so.
And I agree, they have to develop a common solution and having a single European standard would be great but the fact is that Bizum, Blik, Bancoman and many more were here before Wero they are not going to switch now just because France and Germany say so. We have to push for integration and for Wero to be one part of the system.
The EPI is not a German governing body. It is a partnership of banks who decided to implement Wero. All of them had to work to support it in addition to their existing systems, though it is not exceptionally hard because it’s just a frontend for SEPA. If Spanish banks want to provide Wero to their customers then they’ll join the EPI and have the same say as everyone else. But again, it’s just fucking QR codes that translate to “make an instant SEPA mandate to send X € to Y IBAN” so I don’t understand what there is to be scared of on a technical level.
I don’t understand the point of fragmenting the Eurozone for the sake of fragmenting the Eurozone. Integration is in the long run more complex, expensive, and less user-friendly than standardization. What is so good about competing solutions that they should not eventually be replaced by a common digital payment system?
It’s like with Euro, a lot of countries adopted it and have a say but Germany is the biggest fish so has most to say. This was seen during the crisis when Germany was the one deciding who gets rescue money and on what conditions. I doubt Spanish banks would be an equal partner in EPI, Germany and France will lead it.
On a technical level I don’t know what the long term plans are. It’s actually interesting topic. I will do some digging. If it were as simple as a QR code then I don’t think anyone would be opposing it.
And the point is that Eurozone was already fragmented before Wero arrived. No one is halting Wero to introduce alternative, incompatible solutions. Some countries tried to agree on common standard, this failed, they implemented bunch of different solutions, and then Wero arrived and is trying to make everyone adopt it. It’s too late, other solutions exist and are integrated on national level. The path is integration between those services now, not switching to Wero.