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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Within Spain it has virtually dropped to zero among my friends since transfering money is trivial now:

- 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

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A tongue in cheek comment from me is that in Spain we have all this beautiful infrastructure but no money to send. I would rather have money to send via a slightly more inconvenient infrastructure.

Europe has Wero and India has UPI. Right now it is still good but it will get increasingly harder for private companies like Stripe and Paypal to operate as this becomes more embedded as a critical public service provided by governments.

Certainly, if your definition of Europe is Belgium, France and Germany.

> Wero is a product of EPI Company SE > Available in Belgium, France and Germany.

Greetings from the rest of Europe.

You are right, however they are backed by the european payment initiative and the idea is that it becomes an eu wide standard. Whether they will succeed and how fast, we shall see.

I'm not happy this is not an ECB project, but commercial banks are behind. I'm sceptical if this will stay free, and on how our transaction data is used.

It's basically the better version of iDeal, used heavily in Netherlands. They're slowly changing the iDeal name to Wero. Apparently it's mostly that, change of name coupled with a bigger scope.

No. Card payments offer fraud protection for customers, so they will still be there for online shopping.

The euro payment scenario has changed drastically in the last few years and it's a good thing for customers: yesterday I was able to pay a US company with Bizum through Stripe.

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