Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
The premise of European payment system is that consumers are protected via law and payments are dirt cheap. While Stripe charges in USA charges 2.9% + 0.30$ per payment, an iDEAL payment (with Stripe) costs only €0.29, that's it. For a television of 1000$, that is hefty 29.30$ payment fee.
Since Wero will be EU wide, it is cheaper to integrate for web shops. Why go to Stripe/Adyen if with a single integration you can get the entire European Union? Don't worry, the adoption will be there.
For money transfers between individuals you know, there are already better solutions, including immediate SEPA wire transfers, Paypal and Sumeria.
The question of transferring money to a stranger or to a business, whether by contactless phone payment or a QR code, remains unanswered.
While Wero will not replace Stripe or Adyen, as these companies provide payment services, it does give companies better negotiation power. If an internal team of a big corp can build a payment integration themselves, they can negiogate a cheaper price at these. Before Wero, you would need to implement iDEAL, Bancontact, Trustly Sofort, Giropay, Przelewy24, Multiblanco, Paylib, and many many others. After Wero, its just one service targeting entire EU.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what country the context is, but I remember using my mothers debit card in Sweden somewhere between 2000-2010 for online things without problems, as I only had a Maestro card at that point which didn't allow online purchases.
Are you sure you didn't use your mother's credit card instead? I also have one of these (embossed 16-digit card number, validity, CVC on the back) lying around, but those are the exception here rather than the rule. I literally only use it for things like online services in other countries. I believe with the country-wide switch from Maestro to V-Pay they should now also universally work for local in-store payments, but I don't think many people are actually using it like that - we're at 45 million yearly transactions for 18 million people.
No, 100% sure it was a debit card, as that's the only thing she ever used, and same for me, never owned a credit card in my life, still only have debit cards.
The debit cards my mom had and the ones I have now are identical to a credit card (including the 16 digit number, CVC and so on) except the fact that the money gets taken from the account directly instead of paying it at the end of the month (as I think credit cards do?).
> 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.
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 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.
The regulation only stipulates "equality of charges", that the bank's fees for a payment into another SEPA country/bank must be the same as into the same bank or within the same country [0]. 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 actually 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 [1]. And 4 EUR for smaller EUR amounts. Far from "free".
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/924/oj
[1] https://www.bankofcyprus.com/globalassets/cyprus/org_methods... [PDF]
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.
SEPA instant might cost extra or not be available but both of that will change soon due to new EU regulations.
For example, I'm in Sweden, and when I get my hair cut, I can Swish my payment to the barber using the Swish app. They get the money within a few seconds. It's very simple. They have a QR code on the wall that I scan with the Swish app, enter the amount I want to pay (I usually add a tip), authenticate with BankID, and that's basically it.
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.
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.
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.
If there is a dispute, it will typically end up in court.
Here (France) some supermarket have started around an year ago to offer no-print-ticket option to get the ticket by mail if you give them one or if you have an account to download from their websites, in eIDAS we have the certified mail concept (by laws in some countries like Italy, since more than a decade) for official formal communications.
There is no need to add another broker/PSP to the list, it's about time to CUT the list.
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.
(Edit: typos)
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.
But they need to change that name, Wero sounds lame.
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.
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.
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.
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.
how is it pronounced, like 'weirdo'?
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.
> 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.
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.
I actually blame previous governments for this, especially their "invite all possible immigrants, give them free money, and worry about consequences later". It didn't make any sense then and it doesn't now but they pulled it in spite of people knowing the consequences as these are clear in other countries.
I strongly believe if they chose a more reasonable strategy, that is being more picky about 1) who is coming in, 2) in what quantities, 3) how to deal with non-integration, 4) regular revisions of immigration policies based on the reality - we wouldn't have the AfD problem now, at least not at this scale.
You can clearly see from Putin's actions on Belorussian border with the EU that it is his main strategy for destabilizing Europe, one that works quite well.
> 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.