- cross-posted to:
- Europe@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- Europe@europe.pub
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.
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Why can’t we just decouple payment processor and payment system? So that you can have your card from …your bank or whoever, pay via Wero on a terminal the supermarket has from …Logitec. Same for the phone, let me use whatever payment app. Sure, would require a standard. But EU has a interest now.
I think they’re doing what you want? Where I live we basically have had this system since 2006. I can use my debit card for online banking, online purchases, in store purchases, personal transactions (for example sending money to friends, instant and free), and for public transport. No need for a credit card or something like venmo.
There’s a case to be made about privacy and such, especially the public transport part, but it is really convenient.
Honestly, never used it, but my understanding is that it’s become pushed for more heavily in recent years in response to Visa/MasterCard doing shit like refusing payments for LGBTQ things and for NSFW things, under dubious reasons
As an American, I would like to purchase my hentai above-board, not having to do weird maneuvers or piracy to get my perversion fix. MasterVisa makes it difficult for me to uphold the social contract. Hopefully, an alternative like Wero can overcome MasterVisa and allow me to do my part.
with only the AfD abstaining.
fucking dumb fascists
Ah yes the party of nationalism wants to keep us bound to foreign payment providers. I wonder why.
“Fucking dumb” and “fascists” seem redundant.
Not stupid. Evil.
Both. Weaponised stupidity
yeah, probably
My question would be, can it be used without a smart phone? If not, is having a google account or iphone an indirect requirement?
right now afaik wero is part of your regular banking app, so it may be usable just online on your banking website or with custom roms like grapheneos, which a decent amount of banking apps support. there’s definitely a lot of reliance on google and apple though.
It’s being presented as being the same as ideal. We’ve been using this for many years. You can pay using your banking app but you can also use your bankcard and an “identifier”. If you want to pay something online you get a code or qr code presented on the website you buy the product. You put your bankcard into the identifier, enter your pin, enter the code or scan the qr and the identifier pops out a code that you enter on the website and the payment is instantly done. If you just use your baking app without the identifier, you are limited in the amount you can pay and the app will sometimes ask to use your identifier and card. It’s really easy and convenient in my opinion.
Edit: we only use our banking app and card. No other accounts needed.
I used my baking app and a gâteau aux apricots appeared, what should i do next?
From what I know, Wero is based on the standard Dutch payment service iDeal. iDeal becoming more international is something I’m very happy with as it works great.
is it pretty much a way to do bank transfers without having to give away your IBAN? I don’t think IBANs need to be kept secret but they’re a bit unwieldy to say the least - and transfers are not always instant.
And with IBAN there are sometimes unknown fees so the amount that your (especially from a different country) transferee receives is less than what you pay, and you only know after 1-3 business days.
That’s not a thing anymore for amounts under 10k or something. Unless your bank is shit and doesn’t automatically use sepa instant, which is free and instant.
More or less, yeah.
If anyone could come up with a good money transfer service, it’s definitely the Dutch. Love their whole Tikkie thing tbh
I domt know what all the different cunts do, visa, stripe etc. But I want to tpa.my phone without google amd visa being involved.
Güero is a mexican slang for blonde or north American
Relying on Android and IOS. Smert! This can be shut down by American interest at a whim. There is no chip and terminal option, right?
It’s not relying on either? It’s a website that also happens to have app versions
It’s a phone number. It can be released as an app on any platform. It doesn’t rely on android and ios
It’s for online payments with your bank app.
Is there any bank app that doesn’t rely on google play or iphone?
Yes, you can just use it through the bank’s webpage on a phone.
My two bank apps (société générale and N26 ) don’t. They only needs a locked bootloader, I run them fine within iodé OS.
But how many online and offline shops accept it? If it wants to succeed, it has to be at least EU driven.
Zero offline shops, there’s no implementation yet. And it will be smartphone based (qr code), no cards. Battery empty? No pay.
It’s just bank payments without having to write the IBAN, and a standardized interface for online store payments when ready.
Most sites use a payment provider that links into services local to the userbase and spits back a standardised output. iDeal is already connected to a lot of those. Likely no extra work for individual sites: just some onboarding at the provider.
And that is exactly what we need in first place - a payment mechanism where both clients and servers can provide or use services. Then Wero, GNU Teller and others could just work without much fuss.
From what I’ve gathered, there is a rushed effort to make this the EU standard payment system as soon as possible. When it is in place it will most likely be integrated by any online vendor that wants to do pan European business.
This is not nor will be EU standard. There are many existing solutions cooperating under the umbrella of European Payment Alliance (EuroPA). This includes Nordic countries, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland and couple more (Austria? Romania?). Wero was pushed by Germany that was late to the game and tried to impose their solution on everyone but looks like they gave up now and last year Wero and EuroPA signed a deal to cooperate. They will work on integrating existing solutions and Wero will be only used in France and Germany (unless something very strange happens and some country abandons their system).
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.
There are still banks “observing” the Situation - that Thing will Not Go over the counter easily. Different and other attempts failed in the past.
But I guess there is a chance in people looking for independence from the US - No offense.
Bancontact/payconiq uses it is the background now, apparently
So all of Benelux and a lot of France and Germany use it for webshops as bancontact/payconiq is integrated into webshop payment platforms using shopify🤢 and others.
Mollie directly can use and accept Wero and is also an option that many webshops use as a middleman and is fairly web builder-agnostic
I strongly suspect that it will become one option amongst others, such as a regular bank transfer, for example.
I’d prefer it is there was a crypto of the Euro. Then transfers can be peer to peer without any middle man, and middle man costs. With all open technology and assuming zero trust. It won’t have the wild value swings because it is a real, regulated and controlled currency. Take the advantages and leave the anarchism.
They are working on it: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
Think a few countries are. We’ll get open, trustworthy, p2p digital currency transfer one day!
That’s controlled by the central bank, it’s the opposite of decentralised
That’s good to keep it fixed value. The transfers are decentralised but it is attached to something real. All the benefits of crypto without the dangers.
They say it works offline so looks like it’s P2P. If you want something not controlled by banks there’s BTC. If you want to pay with it in stores/restaurants it has to backed by some legal entity.
If also need to be stable. If you want a stable currency, which you do, you need control to correct it. Which is what central banks do. All we really want from crypto is open, trustworthy, p2p transfer.
I’d prefer it if there was a useless pseudocurrency that burns 10 trees for every 0.1 point of it of the EU.
Fixed that for you.
There would be the mining if the currency is the Euro. Can’t have people making Euros, it would destabilize the currency. So no mining, so different model, with different processing requirements.
So currency, but worse, thanks, love that
It will be just cash, digitally. No wild value swings or mad mining rush. Money should be boring.
Part of how you keep it like that is you control the supply. Plus with an existing currency, no need to convince anyone anything. Normies go cross eyed when you explain value is all just belief. Economists get that, but they also get the need to be able to stabilize your currency. The belief in that control is as stabilizing as the control of supply of currency.
I just want currency in digital form that is secure and open source. We know how to do that. Have for a while now. Just take a while more to do it.
Death to systems like WorldPay.
That can be done without Crypto shit burning up the planet.
The problem you have with it is really the mining. Not the distributed block chain ledger.
I can’t imagine any way to do crypto without that shite
