Posted by wslh 18 hours ago
My bank (N26) should support this later this year. I hope it becomes as big and successful as Pix.
In the UK and Europe I could just share my bank account number or IBAN and make payments through online banking since the late 1990s (though in the UK they only became instant in 2008.) So Wero sounds like a nice convenience but much less of a game changer.
It will be interesting to see if it manages to expand to goods and services since the EU strictly regulates the fees Visa and Mastercard can charge there so there is less incentive to switch than in some other countries.
Granted, I'm mostly familiar with the Scandinavian bit of Europe, but you can't do jack shit with banking without 2FA which is tied into the national population register.
They decided in the 80ies or 90ies that "relying on knowing secret fixed magic numbers" was not ideal for authenticating people, and sat down and worked out solutions to that problem.
You'd expect it to work like Paypal, where you have to sign in to your account to authorize the direct debit mandate and also have the option to revoke it there.
No, the way it works is that you have to print out a form, fill it out and send it to the payee who you are granting the direct debit mandate, e.g. your landlord. Your landlord then sends a copy of the direct debit mandate to your bank and the bank authorizes direct debit payments immediately without asking you.
If you want to revoke the direct debit mandate, you have to send a form to your landlord that you want to revoke the direct debit mandate.
This is mindbogglingly stupid, since the payee has no obligation to process your revocation immediately and can take their sweet time.
Canceling a direct debit mandate has no impact on your obligation to pay rent. It makes no sense that you have to inform the payee and let them gatekeep the revocation. It also makes it possible for unscrupulous people to request a direct debit mandate without your knowledge.
I think this is the biggest reason to ensure you can pay with a local system in shops and restaurants.
I don't see why Wero should exists, their business model seems like "trying to get money for the same service you can get for free".
For interpersonal transactions I don't really see the advantage here, but for commercial use cases it's got a solid product and purpose.
Wero doesn't stand to benefit much from payment fees as European payment fees are already rather slim compared to, for instance, American ones (crazy things like percentages of purchase price with a minimum amount!).
Usually these systems raise their fees after being established, sometimes even higher than Visa/Mastercard.
Brazil's Pix is something else. It wasn't created by private entities to make money.
As barely anyone has a credit card and very people want to deal with the faff of manually entering billing codes or account numbers, iDEAL usage is near universal for online payments. I don't recall fees ever going up as an end customer.
We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock. Switzerland is not part of SEPA but IBAN is used so it is trivial to send payments to foreign accounts that have an IBAN.
I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.
I sometimes do wonder if these Goverment can work together on a single payment system, federally operated but connected.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
https://euperspectives.eu/2026/02/digital-euro-timeline-at-r...
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
I don't think you can call it a "delay", the project just moves at a glacial pace.
The entire project was never going to finish before 2030. Some banks are upset about it, for sure, but others are in favour.
Some stores only accept Pix and don’t want Visa or cash. As a tourist, you end up unable to access a lot of things because, well, we don’t have Pix.
While I was in Brazil, some thugs with pistols came into a bar where I was. They forced people to send a Pix payment to a specific account, and their money was gone. In the credit card era, I guess the companies, insurance providers, and banks could reverse the transaction and cover the losses. With Pix, as I understand it, nobody feels responsible for it and the money is gone.
I went back to Brazil a few years ago for a couple of weeks, and a kid on the streets asked me if I could buy some chewing gum and help him out. I wanted to, but I had no cash, so I told him I had no cash at all.
He said "It's fine, just send me some with Pix".
I still remember the incredulous look on his face when I told him I also didn't have Pix. He was certain I was lying. "_Everyone_ has it. How come you don't?"