I used Wero for the first time yesterday, and I found it very easy to link to my bank account (just one click on a pop-up). The app is really convenient.
I visited their website and discovered that Wero is currently available in most banks in France, Belgium, and Germany. Their goal is to create a payment system across all of Europe, enabling online payments, in-store payments, or even replacing IBAN transfers.
" Wero is part of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), supported by 14 major European banks and the two largest payment processors in Europe. Our goal is to create a new payment system for Europe, for the future."
I think Wero could replace Visa and Mastercard in our daily payments. I would like to hear your thoughts on this. If you are in France, Belgium, or Germany, you can activate it. Initially, this will support the project, as it is not yet fully functional to replace the payment methods of all European countries.
How does it stack against polish Blik? That one is supported by possibly every bank in Poland, all payment gateways, POS, mobile app, and so on. Hell, I purchased steam games with Blik, and if I see a shop not supporting it,I don't do business. Like, even tiny businesses in Poland that didn't bother to get card terminals in the past, I can pay with Blik. I use it to pay for my son's swimming lessons, cleaning services, i recently used it to withdraw cash from ATM - unnecessarily, because the place I was going of course accepted Blik. I bought my mother flowers on the other end of the country using just sms and blik... and all that without fancy marketing, shit just works.
It is obvious that there are many ways to make digital payments, to the point that each European country has its own payment network.
Wero’s current goal is neither to replace your bank nor to become a company that controls your money. In my view, Wero should be seen as a payment network, similar to Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, etc.
If BLIK (which I am not familiar with) works well for you, that’s great. Wero will probably not replace it but rather to act as an additional layer.
The main advantage lies in European interoperability. If you travel to another European country, BLIK will probably be of no use to you (it appears to rely on the Visa or Mastercard network, depending on the bank, for payments outside of Poland). As a Belgian, if I want to use Bancontact outside of Belgium, I either have to withdraw cash before my trip, pay transaction fees for each payment, or use my Mastercard. In this regard, Wero seems to be a relevant solution.
What do you think?
It seems to me that in country blik is using a joint company wherein the banks have stake, as well as Mastercard has a stake. Outside of Poland Mastercard is the "transport layer" so to say.
If then Wero wants to be an implementation of this lower-lever transaction network,thais is good news, as it can be probably integrated in parallel/addition to Mastercard when we have a falling out. But it's not the impression that I hot from the website- to me it appeared as a consumer application.