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Comment by fweimer | Hacker News Reader

The existing giro system is the real Paypal competitor. Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email. Merchants probably want to rely on another party to maintain their integration, but there is no real need for another centralized service similar to Paypal.

(The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used, and many residents would not even know how to access it. Hence Paypal's network effect can offer value there. Europe is very different.)

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> The existing giro system is the real Paypal competitor. Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email.

Not at all, not even close! In most cases, that's wrong even today.

Want to sell something online? A book you wrote, a game you made? There's no way for people to pay you via giro and automatically receiving the good on the page where the payment process was initiated.

Giro is not instant, and almost no bank will offer an API that signals that a specific customer has transferred funds successfully. It always takes hours, and the confirmation process is almost always only semi-automatic for the seller.

Visa/MasterCard/PayPal/Twint/Tikkie/Wero have and will provide actual value. Giro was nice 15 years ago, but hasn't kept up.

And even for money transfers between two private individuals, giro is the inferior system - mainly because Euro banks fail at UX/UI. I don't know a single bank that offers an "address book" in their online banking app/website. If you want to send someone money, you better remember their IBAN yourself. And because the system comes with a degree of anonymity, you can't even send people money back! Their IBAN is not part of the metadata of an incoming transfer, the only way to send money back is to contact that person and have them send their IBAN.

Austria has the state-run EPS system. It's very ubiquitous here, I use it for most online payments.

ideal will handle that. But it’s only in NL.

ideal is being shut down, and merged with German GiroGo/PayDirekt and Danish Dankort into Wero, which is what this entire subthread is about.

> Giro is not instant, and almost no bank will offer an API that signals that a specific customer has transferred funds successfully.

And because of that we have leeches like Sofortüberweisung. They basically proxy the web interface of your bank and you'll give them full access to your account, so they do the transaction for you by scraping your banks web interface (and your transaction history) and report success to the vendor.

> Sofortüberweisung

A reminder that Sofort is made by Klarna, the company that mandated usage of AI and fired 700 employees because of AI.

not any more: most of these Payment-Initiation-Services (PISP in EU-speach) do use the public PSD2 apis these days. In the dark beginning days, it was scraped, yes.

? IBAN transactions are instant and free.

All three of my banking apps offer adresse books.

why couldnt i sent money back? I see the sender and the IBAN

I can even in some cases cancell payments

where are you at?

me france germany italy and switzerland.

Are you from the states or canada? The parent talked about europe.

> ? IBAN transactions are instant and free.

Instant transactions are a very recent development and are only starting to become common because banks are required by law to support them for free come October. Up until rather recently instant SEPA transfers were often either not supported or came with additional fees attached.

Based on the replies I've been seeing in this post, I'm starting to think that my banks (or I've somehow lucked out) have been very proactive in providing users with desirable features.

Instant transfers have been the default for quite a while, and possible (for a fee) for as long as I can remember.

Online payments with instant confirmation have been really easy for 15+ years.

I'm trying to think of any bank that I've used that would not have "address book"-like functionality, and I can't think of one. All of them have this, and have had the feature for as long as I've used their online banking. Perhaps the banks you're used to aren't very modern?

SEPA transfers are (at least mine have been) max. 1h until the transfer is complete (some limit this to "banking hours"). Instantaneous transfer is common.

It seems to me like there is great variety depending on what bank you use.

API's are common, and even the same between banks now with PSD2.

Tbh, a banking barcode (or EPC QR if you prefer) displayed on the seller's webpage with unique reference + reading it with your phone and making the payment is that internet payment method via giro. The webshop uses PSD2 open banking to get notified of new transactions and knows when it is transferred.

That's also not my experience. Giro was a nightmare compared to paypal 15 years ago and the only reason it slightly improved was regulations, not because the german banks cared about the customer experience. Now in 2025 Giro is dead as banks like DKB don't even hand out those cards by default. The system in germany is a big mess despite so many fintechs in germany.

> Now in 2025 Giro is dead as banks like DKB don't even hand out those cards by default.

Mastercard has started to punish banks that support Girocard by default, demanding that banks drop support.

This is not an issue with Giro or Girocard, but with the existing payment monopolies.

> a banking barcode (or EPC QR if you prefer) displayed on the seller's webpage with unique reference + reading it with your phone and making the payment is that internet payment method via giro. The webshop uses PSD2 open banking to get notified of new transactions and knows when it is transferred.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. This is how services like Twint in Switzerland or PayPal in Germany have worked for the last decade+.

You're saying this is currently possible, with any arbitrary two German/European banks on either end? Your customer scans the QR code, hits a button, and the QR code is replaced by a download link, and the delay is <20 seconds?

Do you have a link for the tech stack to built this?

? I open my bank app go to new transaction scan the IBAN of the seller and send the money. I think the time I made a paypall account added to the paypal transfer time is more then 20sec. I have my banking app anyway.

dude honestly no idea what your point is. since instant and free giro transfer with more or less 3 clicks is the death pf anything else.

why the fuck should I have an extra layer to my bank? Its insecure ;)

I would like to know are you american? This thread is about europe

I'm in Switzerland, and am a customer of several Swiss and German banks. Because of that, I mainly use Twint, and I hope for the rest of us that Wero turns out as well or better than Twint did 10 years ago. The change is long overdue.

The thing Twint (and Wero and PayPal) allows is really easy, fast, cheap (not PayPal) and secure (not PayPal) online stores. Scan the QR Code on screen, 1 second later your download link replaces the QR code. Done.

Now, I'd like to know how to do that with SEPA/giro. PSD2 and open banking sounds promising. You seem knowledgeable. Why doesn't anybody use that (or do you have an example for a online store using it)? How fast is it really?

And why did it take so long? Twint is 10 years old, iDeal is 20 years old, PayPal is 25 years old.

Because once you have those capabilities, you can do a small firmware update on credit card readers with a display, and you can pay by app everywhere - no credit card, NFC or Google/Apple/Samsung pay integration neccessary.

Should be, yes. As long as instant transfers are enabled (which, reading this thread seems to not be as common as I thought).

I don't have a complete solution but this is all public information.

Barcode to read with your bank app (guide is in Finnish) https://www.finanssiala.fi/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Pankki...

Example Bank API: https://op-developer.fi/p/psd2-info

The user will likely take ~20 seconds to get their phone out, unlock it, log in to the bank app, confirm the transaction and set their phone down. The PSD2 API shows the transaction immediately (again, instant transfer being enabled is a prerequisite) and the seller can confirm that payment is complete.

SEPA Instant Credit Transfer allows instant sepa transfers, and soon all transactions will be required to be ict if possible.

Banks have APIs you can integrate with, which e.g. KDE's money app used to support in the past.

The actual underlying transaction system is extremely well designed and reliable, it's just missing the nice APIs that other payment systems have.

Not quite exactly:

There was a earlier competitor much better than PayPal, called Giro-Pay: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giropay

It had all the stuff PayPal had at launch, also some of the feature made it into the eventually-died "Paydirekt" (which also died)

The main reason could be the high fragmentatin across the EU market.

Though, WERO, now we have a new appraoch, this time with support von ECB :-D

Giro was nice 15 years ago

What giro system are you talking about here? Do you mean the postal giro system that has existed in Europe since the 1960s and has been used for postorder shopping since before the Internet existed? That system was already obsolete in NL last century when we had the first digital invoicing systems via e-mail (and digital personal banking via dial-up), and we've had direct online payments via iDeal since 2005. Are you saying that some countries are still relying on paper-based payment instructions in 2025?

I don't know a single bank that offers an "address book" in their online banking app/website.

Conversely, I don't know a single online banking portal that does NOT offer such basic functionality. Santander, ING, and Rabobank all do.

And because the system comes with a degree of anonymity

What do you mean? Every payment in my bank's transaction history shows the account number on the other end of the transfer.

> Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email.

Bank transfers were not instant though, they usually took a work day. This is changing with the introduction of instant transfers, which become mandatory to support this year, and are also not allowed to be more expensive since this year also.

But the merchant got a signal that the money is on the way, so it was quick enough for them to sent out the package.

The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used

I wasn't even aware such a thing existed? Or do you mean Zelle, which seems to be some sort of hybrid system... It's not quite a giro system as found in most of EU, more like "PayPal, but built by BofA and CapOne"

I don't do much banking in the U.S. system, but I'm assuming that ACH transfers get you pretty close to a giro system. Apparently, they are quite slow by SEPA's standards.

Very slow. And not something consumers use to pay each other.

If I need to pay a friend, it’s Venmo or PayPal in the US. In theory Zelle too, but I don’t know anybody who uses it.

For merchants selling stuff internationally on the internet, none of those local systems are any use. You pretty much need to use Paypal or similar - or even wire transfers if you don't mind the delay and inconvenience to the customer.

Wero is actually built to sunset Giro in the EU. Its built on top of Giro as to leverage the well working network but gives more convenience.

This is the first time I hear of „sunset“. Afaik it just is a layer on top and that’s it.

It's in the first paragraph on Wikipedia. Although I know that Wikipedia isn't always 100% correct so take that with a grain of salt.

Quote: "Wero is a European mobile payment system that is intended to replace Giropay in Germany, Paylib in France,[1] Payconiq in Belgium[2] and Luxembourg, and iDEAL in the Netherlands."

You are right.

I was thinking about "SEPA" (more precisely "SEPA Instant") which is the layer WERO builds on.

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