Outside the US many banks offer simple QR payment options, the direct transfer difficulties US citizens encounter that make services like PayPal and Zelle necessary are entirely self imposed.
Paypal has actively lobbied for legislation(or lack of) in ways that has hurt American consumers.
Next year we'll get this in the physical stores...
Wero is a great start but I suspect that PayPal will stay around for many more years.
Sure there are some that are against digital payments and they won’t accept Wero neither, but I would argue the number is very small. And sure in bars/clubs/nightlife it’s cash only but that also won’t change - it’s for tax reasons.
People don’t like PayPal and only use it for the lack of a better alternative. EC is widely used and I bet that Wero will be as well.
Source: lived last 15 years in Berlin
I used to go to a bar in Copenhagen with that principle.
The bar with the privacy principle didn't accept cards, and had a sign to that effect on the bar.
When I was young, cash was beloved by some as a matter of principle because of the fact you didn't need any authority's permission to accept it; coupled with its anonymity.
If you were running the city's only LGBT bookshop, you didn't want your till full of signed, dated checks - and card processors wouldn't do business with you even if you wanted to accept cards.
Stalkers.
Abusive ex’s.
And if you think it’s assholes targeted this way, look at all the women being stalked via flock by cops.
And if you think finances aren’t abused the same way, why do you think the Germans are so worked up about this? The fucking stasi.
A certain type of person will use literally anything they can find against you, including to harass you if they literally can’t find anything you did wrong.
And what better for them than a nice list of all the places and people you have some kind of important vendor or business relationship with - which is why there is money changing hands.
Grocery stores. Gas stations/subway fees, rental payments or mortgage payments. restaurants, gifts or family transfers, work, you name it.
Also, ask an older German if you think I’m kidding.
The European Central Bank is working on regulation regarding the "Digital Euro" which is a bit in a marketing hype loop using block chain and other terms as a hype, while fundamentally trying to come up with a Euro-Zone-Wide approach to create a mostly anonymous digital currency, with some offline capability. If they come up with a final working concept paper, this would become legally mandated with low charges.
Wero is a product by banks, trying to be faster. Trying to have an established platform under their control, which is well established before ECB is ready with D€.
In 2026 I pay contractors working on my US house by logging into my bank and instructing it to mail a paper check.
The only exception is Venmo which everyone expects will be enshittified.
In Germany, cash is strongly preferred or was the last time I was there a few years ago.
In Norway, cash is nigh nonexistent.
Don’t mistake Germany as representative of the median European country when it comes to card transactions.
- Bizum for national transfers, you just need someone's number (which you usually have through WhatsApp) representing 90% of instant payments
- SEPA payments also make bank transfers free and trivial for your European friends
> Wero is a product of EPI Company SE > Available in Belgium, France and Germany.
Greetings from the rest of Europe.
But I think their time has passed.
What's the problem with sharing your bank details? I don't consider those a secret at all. And if they were, chances are they've been compromised somewhere anyway.
Or even backward-compatible changes like requiring banks to give customers virtual account numbers that they can give to different merchants/people and turn on and off.
Well and commit actual fraud/identity they by forging my signature maybe... But we don't see that happen on a large scale because it just isn't feasible/worth it. We would see it otherwise as I'm sure there are plenty of datasets with those pieces of info to be bought..
The abstraction of the middleman makes sense to me for some types of payments, I find bank accounts a bit too low level sometimes.
If you have someone's US bank routing information then you can forge checks against their account. This is an unforced error downstream of still using a system devised in the early years of the 20th century.
> That feels a bit too personal, and is simple to enter wrong.
It feels personal because they're trying to pretend it isn't a secret even though it structurally is one.
Entering it wrong seems like a fake problem. You copy and paste it from your bank's website.
> It’s also nice to be able to change banks or have multiple accounts without having to care about online payments details
A reasonable payments system does the same thing without a middle man taking a vig. For example, Zelle uses email addresses or phone numbers. If you change banks then you register your email address or phone number with the new bank and from then the money goes there instead. There is no reason a system couldn't work the same way for recurring payments.
> For example I had an account frozen for an incorrect inkasso (that was eventually retracted), I was glad I could just ask a friend to send me something to PayPal as a way to do online payments.
This is just a desire for it to be easy to open a new account at a different bank and start using that.
Nobody needs these middle men and the only reason they exist is that the incumbents and regulatory apparatus make the default system unnecessarily difficult.
I am always surprised that people use PayPal for privacy reasons. The company shares a lot more of your information with third parties than a SEPA transfer or card payment would.
/s