These all require Google or Apple devices both by the seller and the buyer. Wero explicitly does not even support non-Google Android devices.
I'm not sure that replacing Visa and MasterCard is really that big of a sovereignty move considering the pervasive dominance American mobile OS tech has. It's a much harder ecosystem to replace.
Heartily agree, even for Americans. I realize there's economies of scale and network effects, I'm not a libertarian, but the US electronic money situation is very bad. No pressure to innovate, be secure, be anonymous, and a small number of business people (out of touch CxOs) arbitrarily debank people and market segments.
Updating an app to not require the Play Store is a lot easier than switching payment provider backend.
Wero can fix the dependency on Google in a day, I don't think the dependency on Google is as bad as the broader dependency on Mastercard/Visa is.
That said, I'd much prefer a European implementation of the same remote attestation APIs that Google uses to convince payment processors that phones can be trusted to manage finances.
On iOS you don't really have a choice so until someone runs Linux on an iPhone, iPhone users are just screwed.
> I'd much prefer a European implementation of the same remote attestation APIs that Google uses to convince payment processors that phones can be trusted to manage finances.
You're basically talking about "government Android phone" since it is built into the chips on the device.
I wonder how 330 million average Europeans will respond to not being able to use iPhones or Google Android phones anymore because they are instead being forced to use "government Android phone" for safety from USA.
I think they'll actually just revolt against the government instead
They don't though, unless I'm missing something stupid there is parity across all national options. And here for example the bank itself has Bancomat AND Visa as an option to pay by at a POS or online etc.
This will allow me to use my card online with a merchant in Germany for example and use my Bancomat process (whatever the new interface is called) will be the gateway.
The hardware is harder to replace, but payment systems aren’t intrinsically tied to the operating systems, yet, except for encryption , which is handled on-device.
So many people commenting that seem to miss what this is. It's the merging of national systems to simply allow a second option. Meaning no influence oversize from the duopoly. See steam news with visa for an example of then throwing their weight.
Apple and Google are bound to Visa/Mastercard's rules. There is basically no EC without the V/M, and Apple and Google won't be happy just selling hardware. How are you paying for your apps and services ?
Looking at it from the privacy lens doesn't help when it's a matter of directly controlling the money flow.
Nevertheless, that app could be one day running with F-Droid and such... or that's what I dream. The infrastructure is only one piece of the huge dependency puzzle.
Well... no so much in practice. My bank automatically enrolled my personal phone number into the system. I asked them to remove it 2 months ago. One month ago I received a reply that they're working on it. I may be the only person in this country that asked for this - they're now probably thinking which is cheaper: to pay the GDPR fine, repeatedly, or patch their banking software and re-certify it, or maybe refuse to have me as their client.
Anyway, I don't know if you actually read GDPR, but the government (& various agencies) and the bank are both exempted from GDPR. They will all know everything I bought through this system, from where and at what price.
European banks are trash and I dont believe the new payment system will be anything that will benefit the customer. It will only benefit european merchants (schwarz group for example) at the detriment of customer.
Europe is a continent in decline. I get more benefits from a Thai bank holding there a tiny amount of money than European 50bn group.
Even if Europe issues its own cards and payment system I expect them to be just shitty and me being charged extra fee abroad trying to pay with it on POS.
The old school banks in Europe (or everywhere?) are trash, correct, but the neobanks are arguably some of the best in the world (Revolut, Monzo, Starling, N26, also Wise, etc). And open banking, regulations against fees, strong consumer protection, etc, are all points against your concern that this’ll only favour merchants. I wouldn’t count on it.
One thing I'd like to check: what are the actual exclusion rules for these systems? The Visa/MC threat to anything deemed vaguely adult content is well documented, but what is and is not allowed on Wero?
And this seems to be another attempt at that. We already had the European Payments Initiative (with Wero), and now they are starting the European Network for Payments. Sounds like the People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front.
Edit: There was also the Euro Alliance of Payment Schemes
Mastercard pretty much depended on Eurocard/Europay for it's European reach (and vice versa) before the 2 merged, European institutions didn't have a problem selling out important infrastructure because Europeans overall trusted American stability and cooperation.
Instant settlement. The new systems usually run at the level of the reserve currency, or highest national bank.
In Australia the system is the NPP, and the public face is Osko/PayID, so you can use an email or mobile identifier to instantly transfer money between people's accounts. Australia is rolling out PayTo, which is a B2C form of direct debit, which is revocable by the customer but allows for subscriptions and other payments.
The next step will be offering a bank account with PayID/PayTo, a contactless form of payment stored in a Google/Apple/Samsung Wallet, and a line of credit.
Which is all that a credit card is.
This announcement is about similar national systems evolving into cross-European payments. So an instant payment from a French bank account to a Spanish bank account via contactless payment terminal without using the Visa/MC "rails".
In Thailand it's promptpay
Usually, a product that costs $100 costs me the same $100 regardless of the payment processors involved (and $100 cash when none are involved), so I can't see where "lower prices for consumers" could come from.
I've seen few places accepting only cash or cards from a local payment processor. And it looks like local payment processor takes about 0.16% from each transaction.
So I assume that if they were accepting more expensive cards, they might've increase the price of the $100.16 product for me, to offset their costs.
And yes, I also heard that payment processors have rules that require merchants to have the same price no matter what payment processor (or cash) customer will choose.
There are many other options already besides Visa and Mastercard. What I'm asking and nobody wants to answer is what the benefits for users are. The first thing you should think about when making a new product or service.
People are only answering me here with benefits for European politicians and their sovereignty. That's alright. But what I'm asking about is benefits for the users.
For example, Visa and Mastercard offer fraud protection to the users, and many card emitters offer cashback to their users. Can this new European system offer this? If not, why not? Can they offer something else which benefits the user over current providers?
There are not many other options already besides Visa/MC for their payment network, not the branding. Interbank account transfers with instant settlement are clumsy.
The change is that newer financial systems, using ISO20022, run at bank level, allow instant net settlement between individual accounts, not just settlement at the bank level.
So the benefits to merchants/customers compared to Visa/MC:
Merchants
* Interchange is much cheaper, because the banks transact via the central clearing house which is usually sponsored by the country's reserve bank
* It allows for the merchant to set up direct debit payment structures that allow for things like subscriptions and other payments to be made with similar network and transaction fee savings
* It has all of the advantages of EFT and CC payments
* It can use QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers as identifiers, so it is much easier to pass on payment details. Merchants can operate with just a printed QR code, verifying payment on the customer's mobile.
Customers
* Banks can offer all of the same "perks" of credit cards, like lines of credit, branding, account holder offers.
* They can offer things like product insurance and return protection and similar consumer protections.
The "rails" are much cheaper to run and suits a 21st century financial system and is easier and more secure for consumers.
What banks "can offer" is irrelevant until they offer it in practice.
As a customer, I have zero interest in paying for my lunch via "QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers" when I can do it with near-zero friction with a double-click on a phone (funded by a credit card), or with a tap or swipe of the credit card. I also have better protections. Switching costs are non-zero and I will only switch if there are some substantial benefits; pure "feature parity" is a reason to not switch.
The benefits to merchants are tangential to me, but there is a substantial downside of all the merchants having to do integration with an additional system.
> What I'm asking and nobody wants to answer is what the benefits for users are.
I answered that it will lower prices, does that not count as a benefit to users?
Even if merchants pay the processing fees, those prices are inevitably passed onto their customers. With more competition among payment processors there will be pressure to lower processing fees.
All of this happens automatically. It’s the beauty of markets.
I’ll rephrase your own question in a different way that I think actually supports my point: Since there is no difference, as a product, between visa, Mastercard, and this new European alliance, then there is very little reason to not want more competition.
Payment processing is essentially a commodity in this sense. It’s all the same, with the differentiator being supply. If we increase the supply the price will go down. That’s it. It should honestly be stupid to not want a European alternative.
The problem with your argument is that the price to the consumer stays the same, regardless of the payment processor involved (or cash when none are involved.) These are the rules set by payment processors. With these rules, the prices will stay the same with any amount of the supply. If these rules are changed, all payment processors will suffer in cash's favour, and as governments oppose cash-based economy for tax maximisation, the change of the rules is unlikely.
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."
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.
Why do you need a stablecoin if you can send the currency itself directly? If I have euros and the recipient wants euros, why would I need a stablecoin?
Not only is it a solution looking for a problem but it also opens up exchange fees and chance to be more easily robbed by North Korean government backed hackers looking to evade sanctions.
Some years ago I had to execute an international money transfer by SWIFT to someone in South America from our European bank:
Unfortunately, I did a copy & paste error by reusing the prior version and not overwriting all the data - I forgot to replace the bank account number, but name & co was OK.
The money didnt arrive, customer was getting angrier and angrier. Esp. since this transaction was related to crypto and back then was one of first BTC highflyertimes.
A couple of days later I received a message from the bank, asking for having a quick call. In the meantime, they had called the customer to investigate even more.
Quickly we found out that it was just my mistake by copying & re-using the form. I sent them a SWIFT message confirming what was discussed and that the right account number is indeed 123 instead of 678.
In the end, all of us were happy, even with a little delay.
Im 100% sure that this type of cooperation would never work on any of these crypto stacks :-))
It's not for you. It's for companies. They're implementing it first for person-to-person transactions just to test the system. Wouldn't want a big corp to lose millions of euro because of a bug!
I'm not sure that replacing Visa and MasterCard is really that big of a sovereignty move considering the pervasive dominance American mobile OS tech has. It's a much harder ecosystem to replace.
Wero can fix the dependency on Google in a day, I don't think the dependency on Google is as bad as the broader dependency on Mastercard/Visa is.
That said, I'd much prefer a European implementation of the same remote attestation APIs that Google uses to convince payment processors that phones can be trusted to manage finances.
On iOS you don't really have a choice so until someone runs Linux on an iPhone, iPhone users are just screwed.
Phones can NOT be trusted to manage finances. They should issue EU credit/debit cards instead.
You're basically talking about "government Android phone" since it is built into the chips on the device.
I wonder how 330 million average Europeans will respond to not being able to use iPhones or Google Android phones anymore because they are instead being forced to use "government Android phone" for safety from USA.
I think they'll actually just revolt against the government instead
Not to mention that the EU seems to be incapable of actually building usable software, let alone a whole mobile OS ecosystem
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...
If you don't, two lock-ins and network effects reinforce each other.
This will allow me to use my card online with a merchant in Germany for example and use my Bancomat process (whatever the new interface is called) will be the gateway.
That's exactly what they did to high profile European judges. You can't pull that stunt and expect to get away with it long term.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-turn-intern...
Looking at it from the privacy lens doesn't help when it's a matter of directly controlling the money flow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
Anyway, I don't know if you actually read GDPR, but the government (& various agencies) and the bank are both exempted from GDPR. They will all know everything I bought through this system, from where and at what price.
Europe is a continent in decline. I get more benefits from a Thai bank holding there a tiny amount of money than European 50bn group.
Even if Europe issues its own cards and payment system I expect them to be just shitty and me being charged extra fee abroad trying to pay with it on POS.
UPI now interoperates with other equivalent new payment platforms in Asia.
Edit: There was also the Euro Alliance of Payment Schemes
Regional Financial autonomy is a very attractive benefit.
In Australia the system is the NPP, and the public face is Osko/PayID, so you can use an email or mobile identifier to instantly transfer money between people's accounts. Australia is rolling out PayTo, which is a B2C form of direct debit, which is revocable by the customer but allows for subscriptions and other payments.
The next step will be offering a bank account with PayID/PayTo, a contactless form of payment stored in a Google/Apple/Samsung Wallet, and a line of credit.
Which is all that a credit card is.
This announcement is about similar national systems evolving into cross-European payments. So an instant payment from a French bank account to a Spanish bank account via contactless payment terminal without using the Visa/MC "rails". In Thailand it's promptpay
So I assume that if they were accepting more expensive cards, they might've increase the price of the $100.16 product for me, to offset their costs.
And yes, I also heard that payment processors have rules that require merchants to have the same price no matter what payment processor (or cash) customer will choose.
People are only answering me here with benefits for European politicians and their sovereignty. That's alright. But what I'm asking about is benefits for the users.
For example, Visa and Mastercard offer fraud protection to the users, and many card emitters offer cashback to their users. Can this new European system offer this? If not, why not? Can they offer something else which benefits the user over current providers?
The change is that newer financial systems, using ISO20022, run at bank level, allow instant net settlement between individual accounts, not just settlement at the bank level.
So the benefits to merchants/customers compared to Visa/MC:
Merchants
* Interchange is much cheaper, because the banks transact via the central clearing house which is usually sponsored by the country's reserve bank
* It allows for the merchant to set up direct debit payment structures that allow for things like subscriptions and other payments to be made with similar network and transaction fee savings
* It has all of the advantages of EFT and CC payments
* It can use QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers as identifiers, so it is much easier to pass on payment details. Merchants can operate with just a printed QR code, verifying payment on the customer's mobile.
Customers
* Banks can offer all of the same "perks" of credit cards, like lines of credit, branding, account holder offers.
* They can offer things like product insurance and return protection and similar consumer protections.
The "rails" are much cheaper to run and suits a 21st century financial system and is easier and more secure for consumers.
As a customer, I have zero interest in paying for my lunch via "QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers" when I can do it with near-zero friction with a double-click on a phone (funded by a credit card), or with a tap or swipe of the credit card. I also have better protections. Switching costs are non-zero and I will only switch if there are some substantial benefits; pure "feature parity" is a reason to not switch.
The benefits to merchants are tangential to me, but there is a substantial downside of all the merchants having to do integration with an additional system.
I answered that it will lower prices, does that not count as a benefit to users?
Even if merchants pay the processing fees, those prices are inevitably passed onto their customers. With more competition among payment processors there will be pressure to lower processing fees.
All of this happens automatically. It’s the beauty of markets.
I’ll rephrase your own question in a different way that I think actually supports my point: Since there is no difference, as a product, between visa, Mastercard, and this new European alliance, then there is very little reason to not want more competition.
Payment processing is essentially a commodity in this sense. It’s all the same, with the differentiator being supply. If we increase the supply the price will go down. That’s it. It should honestly be stupid to not want a European alternative.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...
This is probably what pushed them to accelerate the implementation.
Removing reliance on American tooling is an essential security matter, it's going to take some time to unpick 80 years of interdependence though.
The question here is "what is the benefit to individual users," not "what is the benefit to the users community as a whole."
I know that JCB exists in Japan and Mir exists in Russia, but never saw them accepted anywhere except these countries respectively.
IBAN, I'll grant you. But it's not exactly intuitive.
Solution looking for a problem?
https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/28/north-korean-hackers-sus...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6eq84eygz0qo
Unfortunately, I did a copy & paste error by reusing the prior version and not overwriting all the data - I forgot to replace the bank account number, but name & co was OK.
The money didnt arrive, customer was getting angrier and angrier. Esp. since this transaction was related to crypto and back then was one of first BTC highflyertimes.
A couple of days later I received a message from the bank, asking for having a quick call. In the meantime, they had called the customer to investigate even more.
Quickly we found out that it was just my mistake by copying & re-using the form. I sent them a SWIFT message confirming what was discussed and that the right account number is indeed 123 instead of 678.
In the end, all of us were happy, even with a little delay.
Im 100% sure that this type of cooperation would never work on any of these crypto stacks :-))