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Comment by raron | Hacker News Reader

Wero is just another private company trying get their cut of payment fees. You can do the same thing with SEPA Instant Payment (or some member states outside of the Eurozone have their own similar thing).

I don't see why Wero should exists, their business model seems like "trying to get money for the same service you can get for free".

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Wero does several things. You can already send instant payments if you fill out IBAN and such, but entering order numbers, account references, and other such cruft for purchasing products is a pain. Companies receiving such payments also need to connect payment to a user and update their digital processes somehow. Wero offers such a solution so you don't have to find a PSD2 processor (which will probably cost just as much).

For interpersonal transactions I don't really see the advantage here, but for commercial use cases it's got a solid product and purpose.

Wero doesn't stand to benefit much from payment fees as European payment fees are already rather slim compared to, for instance, American ones (crazy things like percentages of purchase price with a minimum amount!).

So how can a QR code not supply the necessary data? Example:

   payment://iban=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&amount=12.34EUR

Any bank app should be able to read this. What is so complicated? Right, nothing. Credit card companies are a hidden tax, worse, they are a tax on turnover, not profits.

It can, in fact there is even an open standard for that:

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

By the way credit card companies do a lot more than Wero, SEPA or any other similar instant payment solution (e.g. chargeback).

But in EU you don't usually get credit... The cards are often debit only. Yes, credit cards do exist but they are not like the american cards, and things like chargebacks are not super simple. I for example haven't had a credit card over a decade now...

Chargebacks exists for (EU style) debit cards, too. It doesn't need to be simple just available, so if the merchant disappears with your money or someone uses your stolen card, there is a way you can get your money back. With bank transfers that's not possible (at least here).

wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure

Sweden has a similar "initiative" set up by a consortium of banks (Swish), as do many other European countries.

Usually these systems raise their fees after being established, sometimes even higher than Visa/Mastercard.

Brazil's Pix is something else. It wasn't created by private entities to make money.

Wero's Dutch predecessor, iDEAL, has been an established part of online payments for 20 years now.

As barely anyone has a credit card and very people want to deal with the faff of manually entering billing codes or account numbers, iDEAL usage is near universal for online payments. I don't recall fees ever going up as an end customer.

Card fees aren't paid by end customers either. The Swedish iDEAL equivalent, Swish, is more expensive than cards for smaller transactions (below 15 euros). Wero will be like Swish, not Pix.

Wero is not something that "will be", Wero already is. It used to be called something else for decades, but that doesn't change much.

Yep. The new thing is that you can pay your groceries with it in the supermarket early next year.

What I was reading, you're supposed to be able to send money to people with it this summer, pay in internet shops late this year and supermarkets and restaurants will follow in 2027.

I couldn't have said it better. I don't understand what they solve.

We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock. Switzerland is not part of SEPA but IBAN is used so it is trivial to send payments to foreign accounts that have an IBAN.

I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.

In Germany we have free instant SEPA transfers. What Wero solves is that you can send money without giving your IBAN number, which at least in Germany can be used to take money from your account.

So you get standardized payment system where you scan a QR code or NFC tag with your bank app and the payment goes through IBAN and the system shows an approval of payment.

It still uses the same systems under the surface.

> your IBAN number, which at least in Germany can be used to take money from your account

What the f#*k?!

It's called SEPA direct debit. For some reason people don't want to use their web bank to pay for things, so what you usually do is you do a SEPA direct debit contract and the company takes the money from your account every month.

SEPA instant already exists. I think it guarantees sub-10s transactions. Unfortunately it is not the default.

SEPA is only for Euros but there are countries that don't use Euros that still use IBAN (e.g. Switzerland and UK).

The UK has had instant transfers for many years.

Switzerland since last summer, but banks aren't forced to expose the feature to retail customers yet, at least not for free. We could have had that 15 years ago if our government wasn't so afraid of upsetting the banking lobbies.

> We need instant, free SEPA transfers around the clock.

We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere

> Switzerland is not part of SEPA

We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).

> I don't understand what they solve. [...]

> I always say that the day Trump decides to block Visa/MasterCard outside the US is the day we get instant payments and finally get rid of cards.

You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.

> We have? SCT inst has been rolled out almost everywhere

That is true; I should have said "EEA" or "countries supporting IBAN".

> We definitely are. Transfers in EUR from/to CH IBANs use SEPA rails. CHF accounts can also send or receive EUR transparently (usually at a bad FX rate, but it just works).

Yes, which is exactly my point. We need it to work for CHF as well. Instant payments are not the norm and in fact UBS is charging for it.

> You answered your own question. We need pan-European payments systems on top of the existing banking infrastructure. Payments and transfers aren't the same thing. By moving to mobile wallets with QR code and NFC payments, this opens up interoperability beyond Europe too.

A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.

This is a false dichotomy. You can have very cheap transaction fees, Pix is state-run and probably operates at a loss, with merchant fees as low as 0.2~0.3%. In comparison the cheapest card payment under the EEA interchange cap is probably slightly above 0.5% when you add scheme fees and PSP costs.

However businesses do require payment systems and not just barebones bank transfers. Except for high trust, low volume transactions such as buying a car, paying your rent...

> A payment should be a bank transfer. Anything more complicated is just something that is to be exploited by middle-men.

I disagree with that. Payments (especially online and contactless ones) should have some form of buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction, lost / stolen cards, etc.

> buyer protection, chargeback and a way to handle fraudulent transaction

There is; it's called a bank.

Maybe that's changes by country, but here bank transfers are basically final and can not be cancelled or recalled. Why would a bank cover your losses from their profits?

Which has zero incentive to side with the other party. You pay by bank transfer, once the money is on the merchant's account, why would their bank ever agree to a refund in case of dispute? Now it's between you and the merchant, good luck with filing police reports and court claims especially abroad.

In Switzerland there are a lot of cases where the bank will actually refund you if it was a fraudulent payment.

Hu, no?

The most common scams nowadays involve social engineering to make people log into their online banking and transfer money, specifically because there's no way to revert transactions. The victims are typically 100% liable as they accept and authorize these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbihSwrKhk

https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/kassenstur...

Fair enough, you're right.

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