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Comment by arpinum | Hacker News Reader

This is the EU equivalent of Zelle, but pushing into merchant payments and owned and run by the banks.

When the telcos tried to compete with the cloud providers by offering OpenStack they learned the business wasn't as simple as offering 10-15 services with some racks. I can imagine the same hidden complexity for payment rails

On the other hand regulations have taken too much power away from merchants and Wero could succeed with more merchant friendly terms. They are doing 3-legged payments so they are not subject to as many European regulations as Visa/Mastercard.

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We already have SEPA payments in the EU. The path has been paved.

UK Open Banking is a counter example to this argument. It’s been a huge success. Transfers between accounts are seamless, and I never need to authorize Plaid to maintain a permanent session in a headless Chromium instance reading my bank account. The APIs are well-defined, universally supported, and include authorization scopes for viewing balance, authorizing transfers, etc.

That said, I don’t do many p2p payments in the UK (mostly because I’m an adult now, not splitting every bill like I was in college). And I wouldn’t like to add every one of my friends to my banking transfer history. The UK is missing something like Venmo with wide adoption. I assume the kids these days mostly use features like Apple Cash or Monzo transfers.

I have not heard about UK Open Banking rails for merchants being popular. You are talking about P2P? the article is about challenging Visa/Mastercard.

The article mentions P2P is coming first. It’s also in French, so I’m relying on translation…

Sort of a success - people in the UK still ask for me for my account number and sort code.

The banks will be fine. Australia implemented a similar system a while back (NPP/Osko) which is a standard adopted by 100+ banks. It was designed as a replacement for standard bank transfers which usually took a couple of days.

Now, even transfers in the tens of thousands move instantly. This was also a response to apps like Venmo potentially entering the market - now you can just pay to a phone number or email, as long as it’s been explicitly linked to a bank account. This is by far the preferred way to send money here and third party apps are not common.

They’ve also now introduced PayTo which manages debits and payments online with no fee. You simply approve the transaction in your bank’s app.

Australia also has widespread Visa and Mastercard use, but Eftpos has always existed - which is a fee free alternative around since the 1980s. It supports contactless, but that isn’t widespread due to weak international support and can only be used with debit cards.

The downside is that new features need to be implemented by each bank app, but it’s been interesting to see some of the smaller credit unions collaborating for example.

We already have instant SEPA payments and most countries already have a version of this running, I think the idea is that this unifies it across europe. I can send money to any friend in 20 seconds with Bizum in Spain and a lot of merchants also accept Bizum.

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