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Comment by vrganj | Hacker News Reader

Being able to pay across Europe with the systems they already have instead of only being able to use them in their own country.

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You can already do that with Visa and Mastercard and IBAN.

Not everyone.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...

This is probably what pushed them to accelerate the implementation.

Yeah, but the point is to be able to do it without Visa and Mastercard.

IBAN, I'll grant you. But it's not exactly intuitive.

I understand that this is the point, but what is the benefit for users?

In case of IBAN: Wero is just another user/function layer on top of SEPA, adding things like "sent money by email or phone number", as they are the aggregator putting this function live,since this functionality was not supposed to be part of SEPA standard.

American companies at the behest of American leadership which has turned is back on free trade and has weaponised trade against its allies.

Removing reliance on American tooling is an essential security matter, it's going to take some time to unpick 80 years of interdependence though.

You can't convince millions of users to switch from one payment method to another by the "weaponised" and "reliance" and "essential security" arguments. These arguments might work on me but not on my parents nor my children (who do not care much about these but do care about having a universally accepted payment method which is easy and safe to use.)

The question here is "what is the benefit to individual users," not "what is the benefit to the users community as a whole."

Yet pretty much every country uses non visa/mastercard as a first line payment and they are insanely popular.

…within that specific country.

I know that JCB exists in Japan and Mir exists in Russia, but never saw them accepted anywhere except these countries respectively.

That is precisely what this submission is about. They're making these local systems within Europe interoperable.

I saw a massive advert this week in Singapore for UPI, "pay like you do in India". Systems like Alipay are accepted very widely too.

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