Comment by timpera
4 hours ago
Wero is not French, but it has replaced France's Paylib. It's pretty awesome and seems to quickly have replaced all other apps (Lydia, PayPal) for small payments in my friend and family circles. I'm excited to see it expand to PoS payments.
From what I understand, Wero is identical to iDeal, which has been the standard Dutch internet payment system for decades. So I'm a bit surprised to see France claim ownership.
Wero is a initiative of a collection of banks from a handful of countries. Every country already had something like this, in some form of another, and now all these systems are getting merged into a common system.
No single country can claim ownership because it's an EU initiative. iDeal was one of the first and relatively easy systems across the EU, but it's hardly the predecessor.
Wero also does peer-to-peer transfers which iDeal doesn't (unless you use iDeal to pay for tikkies but that's still two apps). The new system is not just an iDeal rebranding.
> Wero also does peer-to-peer transfers which iDeal doesn't
Directly, without Tikkie? That's really interesting. I wasn't aware of that yet. My impression was indeed mostly a rebranding and expansion of iDeal.
Can you confirm people in france actually use wero? I had heard of it every so often but basically zero people actually use it, my revolut app has a feature to use wero but never used it. I mean would be great, getting rid of CC fees could literally lower grocery prices by 1-2%.
I use it for basically every payment with friends.
The greatest force of Wero is that, being from a bank consortium and not "another app", you can send money to people that don't even know the system exists as long as you have their phone number because the money will go straight to the bank account registered with this phone number.
You don't need to register to the service to receive money so basically anyone holding an account in a compatible bank can receive funds instantly. Which means, as the person sending the money, you don't have to tell your friends to install it.
I can only speak from my experience, but yes, multiple people (a few friends, people at work, and my uncle) have suggested to "make [me] a Wero" lately to pay me back small amounts. The fact that's it's integrated into the existing banking apps helps.
Every single friend to friend transfer around me is done via wero these days. And between business SEPA more and more.
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