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Comment by anticrymactic | Hacker News Reader

Wero is such a valuable asset for Europe and couldn't have come at a better time.

It's built on the excellent SEPA system, which standardized bank transfers and "Lastschrift" in Europe. SEPA itself got a huge upgrade last year with mandatory instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers between European checking accounts.

Both of those allowed Wero to happen as a final abstract top layer, meaning: the UX of sending money to an email address with the security and convenience of bank transfers. And everything is built collaboratively on top of European banking infrastructure.

No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.

And before some says: "Well, now the government controls everything!": They already did, since... Ever. Now its one less entity with that access and one that can be (hopefully) controlled and changed by a majority.

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Note that Wero is amongs others based on the Dutch iDEAL [1] system, which was introduced 21 years ago. Virtually every Dutch web shop supports iDEAL (and many only support iDEAL) as well as international payment services such as PayPal and Stripe. As a result, the vast majority of transactions of Dutch webshops go through iDEAL. It is really a super-nice frictionless system.

iDEAL also supports P2P payments through Tikkie (ABN AMRO) or the payment request option of other banks. You basically show a QR code or send a link and the person paying goes through the iDEAL flow to transfer the money. Tikkie (and the other bank's similar and compatible systems) have been one of the primary methods for P2P transfers for many years now.

I am really happy that we are getting the same system across multiple countries now. Contactless payments through Wero are also planned, so that we can finally become independent of Google/Apple Pay for contactless payments using a phone.

[1] EPI purchased the Dutch iDEAL and Belgian Payconiq and mentioned on multiple occasions that Wero is based on the foundations of iDEAL. They kept iDEAL running as a separate system in order not to disturb it during the upbringing of Wero, but iDeal is going to migrated to Wero the coming period.

It's not the same system. iDEAL supports banks to implement payment in their online banking websites, while Wero is Google/Apple ecosystem exclusive.

> while Wero is Google/Apple ecosystem exclusive

It's barely launched in more than 5 EU countries. It's not part of the specs or requirements to only be available in the Google / Apple ecosystem.

> It's not part of the specs or requirements to only be available in the Google / Apple ecosystem.

but at the moment, it is. so he's right to be nervous. from one american duopoly to another.

but i share your optimism that they eventually allow this to work without them.

The commenter is stating that as a fact, which is spreading information that's not true to others reading that.

Perfect is the enemy of good as always. Having a system that is currently available on the two biggest mobile platforms for the launch (Covering probably 99.9% of consumers) is already much better than piping every single transaction through two US mega corps.

Replies from the German GLS bank on mastodon imply that EPI does not support the use case where banks add it to their web interface

https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116215341782832097 https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116125936995037426

> Good morning, it's not "our" fault. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it—Wero is a service offered by EPI, and they've decided to take a "mobile-first" approach for now. Warm regards from Bochum!

As for the prospects of ever seeing banking apps outside of android/ios, there is only https://www.das-parlament.de/wirtschaft/finanzen/wir-bauen-m...

> What about smartphones that run on free and open-source software instead of the commercial operating systems used by the iPhone or Google? > Tanja Müller-Ziegler: This market is still very much a niche one. There are still too few providers, which is why it’s hardly worth offering banking apps for these devices.

> Perfect is the enemy of good as always.

I'm no expert on iDEAL, but being 20 years old, it's older than Android and iOS and presumably supported web based payments from the very beginning. I really don't understand why nowadays people seem to think that app exclusivity is somehow a natural starting point. It's a relatively recent invention.

> they've decided to take a "mobile-first" approach for now

That's hardly a confirmation that it will never be possible ("for now"). It seems like a fair tradeoff for a launch when almost everyone has a smartphone and that's already enforced like that for many parts of life (I'm not saying it's great, but it's a valid tradeoff when alternative options exist) like banking or public transport where the happy path often is a phone app.

You'd think that basic infrastructure such as payment systems had higher standards than just "most" people having access to it.

It's fine as long as we have alternatives, but if online shops were to start to phase out SEPA payments in favor of Wero and Wero-only shops were to start popping it, it would be a real problem.

Btw the solution already exists: It's still relatively small scale but GNU Taler is live in Switzerland. The EU could make regulation to make it easier to adopt at any time it wants.

It's a system which is currently barely live in 5 countries out of 27 EU countries. In most of them < 2 banks are supporting it. It's basically a beta rollout and there's no danger of SEPA, MasterCard or VISA going away and leaving people stranded that don't have a smartphone so there's no need to panic.

Give it some time to mature before writing it off.

From their site:

>It is not possible to send Wero payments to friends & family via a web browser or on a computer

https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...

So its pretty clear they have no plans to support plain browser access. Which is a very strange decision to me.

It's primarily an online payment system, not a money transfer system. It has worked since forever (20+ years, it's a rebranded Dutch system) from web browser. Still does.

The horse's mouth seems to contradict this. The subject is Wero, not Ideal.

Wero’s goal is to become a European payment system. Like an iDEAL across EU countries. That requires buy-in from major EU banks, some of which are shareholders of EPI, the company behind Wero.

It’s also a response to the ECB’s digital Euro, a way that banks show the central bank “hey, we the banks are actually capable of creating a good EU-level payment system”.

iDEAL supports banks to implement payment in their online banking websites

So does Wero, as I cited in another comment:

The Wero app is available only for account holders from the German bank Postbank and the French bank La Banque Postale.

Are you a customer of another Wero-enabled bank? If so, you can easily use Wero within your banking app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.epicompany....

It's not the same system.

I said that it is based on the iDEAL system:

Wero is built on the foundation of iDEAL, backed by 16 major European banks – including the Dutch banks behind iDEAL.

https://ideal.nl/en/naar-wero

The European Payments Initiative (EPI) acquired the Dutch payment system iDEAL with the aim of making it the standard payment solution across all European countries. [...] The first step is to make iDEAL the standard in France and Germany because the countries don’t yet have a standard payment system for e-commerce, according to AD. Customers in the Netherlands will notice little of this.

https://nltimes.nl/2023/04/25/dutch-payment-processor-ideal-... / https://www.ad.nl/economie/online-betalingssysteem-ideal-wor...

Really? I frequently use Wero but never installed their app. I use it through my bank application on /e/os

What was the iDEAL payment option now says iDeal WERO. The Dutch are already using WERO for a couple of months now.

Not really. They just changed the logo to make people get used to the name. The next phase where they start migrating the iDEAL infra into Wero starts in October:

https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/actueel/volgende-fase-migrat...

English version: https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/en/news/next-phase-of-ideal-...

We don't, it's the same ideal 2.0 with a different logo. Literally nothing changed and I saw the exact commits too.

> and many only support iDEAL

Actually, look closer when you pay using Ideal (as we all do). You will notice that usually there are several payment methods, and these almost always include credit cards.

The reason for this is not because the Dutch like to pay using credit cards (most Dutch never use one), but because of a little known law regarding online stores. It is, in fact, not allowed to only offer payment options that require the customer to pay the full amount upfront. And Ideal (and Wero) do just that: you order a T-shirt for €20, you pay €20 upfront, the shirt gets shipped, and you receive it.

Now have a look at this note:

https://www.acm.nl/nl/verkoop-aan-consumenten/de-koop-sluite...

> U mag maximaal 50% vooruitbetaling vragen voor producten die u nog moet leveren.

> Dit betekent dat u standaard mag aanbieden om het hele bedrag te betalen. Maar u geeft klanten ook de mogelijkheid om minimaal 50% pas na levering te betalen.

There are almost no online stores which offer this of course. It's just not part of this commercial model. Not for a T-shirt (or whatever).

So what is the trick the government itself even recommends?

Credit cards.

https://ondernemersplein.overheid.nl/geldzaken-en-belastinge...

Something about the way credit card payments reserve payments initially and the way credit cards offer consumer protection services makes this a payment option which, apparently, fulfils this 50% after delivery rule…

To be honest I like the idea of forcing merchants to accept credit cards in addition to this.

Regardless of how much I like the idea of a payments layer without Visa/Mastercard fees, I think the rich engineers of hackernews and 10,000 overpaid consultants who worked on this massively underestimate how valuable an interest-free 30 day bridge loan is to average people (and businesses) on monthly payroll.

Combine this with the consumer protections and threat of a dispute (which almost always sides with the buyer) and it generally tilts power to the consumer in most credit card transactions, if the consumer has autopay setup (huge caveat of course).

This new layer is totally neutral, and removes the detriment to the merchant in terms of fees/risk, but not sure it’s actually as good for the market as claimed here. For me it’s a net loss, and harming consumers ultimately harms the merchant in terms of willingness to buy things. If it becomes trendy for merchants to start refusing credit cards to use this instead, I will be WAY less likely to take a risk on a purchase I’m not 100% confident about.

Im not willing to try new products from most startups for example if I can’t buy on a credit card.

This applies more to the USA than to Europe, where "credit cards" are in fact mostly debit cards (cursory research says 71% vs 26% in America), and ordinary people tend not to be up to their necks in consumer debt. Anecdotally, I've never used an actual credit card in my life.

Data from the IMF says European households hold a similar level of debt if not more (especially the case in northern Europe):

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

The US used to be an outlier in this regard if you look back to 2000, but over the past 25+ years American households have stayed pretty much the same while their European counterparts have grown debt substantially.

It is almost entirely mortgage debt backed by the collateral of housing.

Not the most productive asset to be leveraging, especially in rapidly declining birth rate countries, no?

Meanwhile, while headline credit card interest rates in the US look insane (like 20%+), in reality loss-adjusted yield actually realized by lenders and paid by consumers (after renegotiated settlements, bankruptcies, payment plans, etc) is less than half that.

You can look at the realized return on personal credit lending on companies balance sheets, its basically like 3.7%. Maybe a few percent more return than what a 30 year mortgage lender can expect going forward (now that we're returning to post-GFC 'normalized' interest rates).

Over 10% of interest is still a lot... And the fact that you get to that rate through settlements and bankruptcies is a good indicator of how much of a stranglehold debt has over a typical American household.

And it's fine if you don't think a home is a bad investment. I think most people do and so far that has worked out almost perfectly. That doesn't mean anything for the future, but there are no guarantees in investing. In a lot of places a mortgage gets you tax breaks too, as opposed to other credit.

I thought Wero is based on ideal 2.0, which in itself is based on payconiq. Which is quite different from th old ideal system

> iDEAL also supports P2P payments through Tikkie (ABN AMRO) or the payment request option of other banks. You basically show a QR code or send a link and the person paying goes through the iDEAL flow to transfer the money. Tikkie (and the other bank's similar and compatible systems) have been one of the primary methods for P2P transfers for many years now.

Is that really p2p? It does not really seem like it. I am interested though, i just don't know anything about iDEAL.

> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.

Officially you need a Google or Apple account to download a wero capable app from their stores, and Google and Apple can always delete all wero capable apps from their stores like for example with Russian sanctioned banks.

Some banking apps work on non - google play controlled android smartphones, but always only accidentally. Some banks like for example Consorbank already crack down on "sideloading" their app at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/Consorsbank/comments/1p909w1/commen...

While researching Wero initially, I was confused too that no APK is offered. Maybe we can change that.grbn

If Wero is going to be similar to iDEAL, which it is based on, the payment flow will be through your bank's app. Heck, even the Wero app description says so:

The Wero app is available only for account holders from the German bank Postbank and the French bank La Banque Postale.

Are you a customer of another Wero-enabled bank? If so, you can easily use Wero within your banking app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.epicompany....

I have seen quite some people downloading their banking apps through the Aurora store (admittedly, it's a frontend for the Play Store, but you don't need an account or the app). Or you can use something like APKMirror and verify that they have the correct signing keys.

Of course, if they need Play Services or Play Integrity basic, then you need sandboxed Google Play or microG. If your bank does remote attestation through Play Integrity, then it is game over, but it is worth contacting your bank. E.g. some banks have added the GrapheneOS signing keys and added support for AOSP remote attestation.

I can pay with iDEAL without interacting with a smartphone, using only my laptop and a physical 2FA device provided by my bank. Do you know if this will be possible with Wero?

I am not 100% sure, but I think PSD3 will require that authentication methods without a smartphone are provided:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/qanda_...

Require payment services providers to ensure that all users can benefit from methods to perform SCA which are adapted to their needs and situations and, in particular, that those methods do not depend on one single technology, device or mechanism, for instance on the possession of a smartphone.

It's up to your bank actually. Banks (generally) don't want to pay for your hardware key so you need to do a special dance to trigger their compliance bound neural pathways to send you one.

But then the true bliss will arrive the next year with eidas 3.0 or whatever it is called

In the Netherlands this boils down to the 'system banks' (the big ones like ING, ABN AMRO, Rabobank, etc.) which grudgingly offer hardware devices for people who won't or can't use a smartphone, and the neobanks (like Revolut, Knab, and Bunq) which make an Android or IOS smartphone a hard requirement.

With Nordea, you get a code book full of one-time codes.

ASN Bank has a website that allows you to set a browser-linked code once, after verifying both your email address and phone number. You can then use that browser+code as the 2FA device. It's pretty neat.

I have German bank accounts at two different banks and can send SEPA SCT instant transactions via webinterface and physical tan generator with both of them. Wero however is restricted to mobile apps regardless of what your tan generator is and in fact from what I heard, banks generally force you to switch to mobile app tan generators when opting into Wero.

The GLS bank implies it's not up to them. Generally I feel like implementation details are intentionally not made public. For example so far there is no definitive statement on the public internet I could find about whether iDEAL web based payments will still be available after iDEAL will actually switch to Wero. Statements like "For consumers, the online payment experience will remain largely unchanged, as they will continue to pay through their own bank." are always kept vague.

I'm not sure I understand the question actually. Will it work the same way for consumer as ideal does now? Yes, that the promise. Will the actual protocol and endpoints used be the same? I guess not, but also nothing drastic for integrators to worry about.

What I don't get is -- what will be added on top of what ideal already does.

>The GLS bank implies it's not up to them.

They probably can't make two systems within the bank talk to each other for whatever reason. One reason could be -- we are afraid to touch one side and the other is supplied by a vendor. Or politics, or just a plain skill issue. I'm not them and can't possibly know, but my employer was named in comments already, so I feel like I can extrapolate a bit

Will it work the same only for users who use banking apps for ideal, or also for users who use their banking websites to pay with ideal? It's a rhetorical question, right now people can only give their opinion what their statements mean or not. We'll have to wait until the end of next year to see what's actually going to happen. Unless EPI or banks decide to publish an actual roadmap with actual features.

Oh wow actual news: https://nos.nl/artikel/2624737-scanner-van-ing-kan-nieuwe-id...

google translate: https://nos-nl.translate.goog/artikel/2624737-scanner-van-in...

This looks like it proves me wrong and at least two dutch banks will not require a smartphone app to pay with Wero, if this actually refers to the upcoming actual Wero transition.

> At Rabobank, "approximately 8 percent of all transactions" are conducted using the Rabo Scanner, says a spokesperson. A spokesperson says that research shows that 15 percent of customers prefer using the scanner instead of the app because they find the Scanner secure.

> There are no problems at Rabobank with the transition from iDeal to Wero, according to a spokesperson. Therefore, nothing changes for customers who use the Scanner with the transition this autumn.

> At ABN Amro, the tool for making payments via online banking is called the E.dentifier. According to a spokesperson, around 250,000 ABN Amro customers are using this device this month, which is 4 percent of the total. The number of users is declining because, according to the bank, more and more customers are switching to the app.

> Although ABN Amro intends to continue offering the internet banking function, including for payments via Wero, the bank will be phasing out the E.dentifier over the coming year. ABN Amro is currently already in the process of informing the first private customers about the switch to the so-called USB Security Key. The E.dentifier will only disappear once all customers have made the switch.

This gives me some hope that this might also be possible in the rest of Europe...

That's encouraging. It also suggests banks recognize that removing hardware authenticators entirely would lock out a non-trivial group of customers. Hopefully the transition ends up being "app-first" rather than "app-only."

Im a German with a German Postbank account, living in Switzerland.

Wero app Play Store page: "This item isn't available in your country."

Hard to cheer for a thing when it prevents you to access your own money, and promises to "easily pay" immediately fall flat.

Paypal is bad but at least it doesn't fail at step 0.

To be fair, how is Google blocking you from downloading an app, a Wero problem though?

The publisher, in this case Postbank, decides what countries to allow installs from for an app. Google just enforces the policy the publisher sets.

Country availability is a policy set up by the app publisher, not a Google policy

Which is complete bullshit with the Euro having been specifically invented to be used across the EU.

I had a similar moment of stupidifiedment trying to park in Germany with a phone set to Dutch region. Euro in cash works everywhere Euros are accepted but apps on the freaking Internet? Nah, gotta restrict that to the publisher country only.

Switzerland is not part of the EU nor the Eurozone though. It's still a shortsighted stance of Postbank not to open the app to at least the DACH region, but that specific argument carries little weight.

I accidentally skipped that part :(

I mean, there's some reason for it as EU countries have different laws and regulations, but yes, it's a dumb choice on the publisher's part

It’s fine to decouple from US payment and financial infra today and punt on decoupling from US big tech in the future. These changes take time and effort at scale, so it’s about being directionally accurate, not doing all the changes all at once. “You eat an elephant one bite at a time.” Europe is eating the financial infra bites right now. There are other bites to be taken over the next several years.

Similar to Airbus moving critical apps from AWS to France’s Scaleway. Flexing the muscle needed to do the rest, and starting with the most important.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I heard a loud and solid "fuck US" from the people forming the technical opinion on this matter.

The way selection function for the technical parties in this conversation is going makes it double the fun.

But you can use Wero also from your good old desktop PC, right? Sure, paying in a restaurant with Wero for example might need this, but I think this is a really, really great first step in the right direction

My bank (BOFIIE2D) now gives me the option of instant or standard payments. Both cost the same. And in both cases the money leaves my account instantly. I can just choose whether it arrives at the recipient instantly or after a few days. I have no idea why standard is still an option. Why would I want that?

Most likely answer is just that BOE doesn’t have a strong product design culture.

But there is another reason why some may prefer standard: due to the instant payment rules banks are not able to hold inbound payments for screening so if a payment trips a flip that requires screening then it will be rejected. Other payment rails will typically result in the payment being held for a manual review where it will be released shortly later. Instant payments will be rejected if not crediting the recipient in a few seconds.

As this disproportionately affects people with names in common with sanctions lists, to send money to/from those people sometimes a standard transfer is the only option.

That makes sense, then. It is actually a useful feature (especially when you're not sure on the spelling of someone's name, etc.).

> the UX of sending money to an email address

> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.

Who owns domain names (which emails require)? No, don't say people do, people don't own domain names, they lease them, and it's not a right either.

You can get the domains from your local European nations registrar though. How is the American conglomerate going to prevent that?

> instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers

Interesting, I didn't know that. Now, why would anyone want to do a non-instant transfer, then (short of not knowing about it like in my case)? Doesn't this mandate basically make all transfers instant?

They are allowed to set caps, I've seen them down to around €5000 per transaction so it's not literally all transfers. Still free to transfer above, just takes more than a few seconds to do so, presumably for fraud/theft protection. Some banks will make that a daily limit, or configurable, there's some flexibility but they're mandated to justify all limits with no arbitrary discrimination against instant transfers.

In practice, obviously most personal payments are well under that margin, so within-EU bank transfers are defacto instant everywhere. Most banking apps I've seen don't even show an 'instant/slow' option any more, it's just all instant.

A lot of banks won’t even give you the option of a non-instant transfer now, at least here in Portugal. Though non-instant transfers can in theory be recalled since there is some time before the money gets to the destination account, my bank even gives a warning now when doing a transfer to ensure I have the details right because they can not recall a transaction after the money arrives.

My bank sets the default to "Standard (1-3 Days). Many forget to click the checkbox. I have also heard: "I only do instant when I need it" implying some implicit cost/limit they fear. This is probably still worth it for Banks. As not _all_ transfers are now the dreadful super expensive instant variety.

It's a dark pattern, my bank does it too. Reminiscent of online stores that put the price-sorting option "High > Low" before "Low > High", as if literally anybody would ever want to do the former. This is a heuristic I use to judge trustworthiness. Decathlon doesn't do it.

You have 1 hour to recall and cancel a transfer, but an instant transfer is non cancellable

So i'm not a fan of banking / money in general, but i'm surprised to such a rose-tainted comment upvoted so high.

The real european alternative is the research project Taler https://taler.net , wero looks like another attempt at big tech to capture the market and force you into android/iphone hell.

I frequently run into failed SEPA transfers. At least three per month out of ~200. So it could use some more stability for my use case.

In all fairness, I also have a couple of VISA payments that fail every month.

"valuable asset for Europe", and it's available in 5 countries. Yay.

We already have a bunch of local non-interoperable systems, so what's one more?

But now every bank needs to support and implement it separately. My bank doesn't so far which is annoying.

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