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.
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.