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Comment by Coeur | Hacker News Reader

Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.

Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.

https://empsa.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...

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Like sepa, this initiative can be forced by law and made open rather than tanken hostage by large cooperates, which may then exclude parts of the market.

Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law. Is Wero really a success? According to this article, in 2024 it processed over €7.5 billion.

Polish BLIK, which is not even mentioned in the article and which has joined the EuroPA Alliance, processed €83 billion in 2024, with a 30% y/y increase in H1 2025. I understand that BLIK is much older, but it invested significant effort and money in marketing and promotions while delivering a good user experience. BLIK is now trying to expand to Romania and Slovakia, yet Wero is getting all the hype on Hacker News. Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently. Is the only “European” solution one that comes from Western Europe?

Wero is very new, no wonder it’s not used a lot yet.

Wero is basically a rename (and territorial expansion) of the Dutch iDeal system, which processed €141 billion Euros in 2024.

not really

Wero acquired iDeal and integrated it (as well as Payconiq)

> Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently.

Just my pet peeve, but say Central Europe here, not East. Unless of course you mean Ukraine or Kazachstan.

Referring to old Iron Curtain is refueling the animosity of the ancient past.

If BLIK is better then it will prevail over Wero. There is no law mandating Wero.

Just looking at the banks that make up each - 16 for Wero and spread over Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands versus 6 Polish banks - it feels like the systemic risk is higher with the latter. But time will tell.

Last year BLIK also signed a letter of intent to join the EuroPA which has Italian, Spanish and Portuguese banks involved.

The EU consists of 27 different countries, with substantial practical barriers between their internal markets (even if it's one single market in theory). Often, only EU intervention can overcome those barriers. Otherwise, you end up with national fragmentation.

Solve the problem and people will come. I don't see which problem Wero is solving. Cross country p2p money transfers? Not something people do often.

What people in Europe do very frequently is buying from online shops of another country, either because they do not find the product in a local shop or because of better prices.

What is needed is a card for online shopping that is valid in all Europe.

But it's not the card. Wero isn't doing anything new. It's just yet one more payment method to implement. Adyen, Stripe, Shopify and many other already support different local payment methods.

> Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law

Isn't that like the entire purpose of government and law - to help citizens come to a consensus?

No, in most of the cases government should not be the parent, but external arbiter.

One problem I see with some of the EMPSA systems, is that if you're a developer and - if you don't have a company behind you, you're pretty much shit out of luck trying to integrate any of these payment solutions.

That have at least been my experience, trying to integrate Vipps in Scandinavia.

What was your experience like trying to integrate with Vipps?

We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.

Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).

The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).

> Bluecode

Never heard about this before, and I'm a German.

In Austria EPS is also very commonly used.

Wero is iDeal.

I wish it was still just iDeal. The rebranding was done very poorly and the things that they added like accounts are just bad ideas

I thought they were interconnecting all those ideal-like systems from different countries and then rebranding to Wero? So the tech may be different per area but they all interconnect and the UX is the same.

But maybe I misunderstood and other places are actually replacing tech.

>Vipps (rest of Scandinavia)

This is wrong.

Vipps MobilePay is in Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden.

That is almost all Nordic countries, and all of Scandinavia.

Caveat that Vipps support in Sweden is severely lacking compared to the other countries where it's the main system in use.

We need the Swedish banks to open up.

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