what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.
I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.
In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
Wikipedia gives an overview by year.
As for the axe, I have no personal interest.