The concept of a physical card is obsolete. That North Americans and western Europeans for a good part still use them is just stickiness of the infrastructure, and habits.

Developing countries have mostly leapfrogged to total contactless payments.

In South Aast Asia, you typically scan a QR code and approve a payment from your own phone. Far less fraud as a result. Nobody is able to touch your card, you don't have one.

Europe likely identified they better make the jump.

Wero is just one of many systems available that allow individuals to make transfers easily and almost instantly. There is also Bizum in Iberia and Blik in Poland. These instant phone-to-phone transfers are very popular, especially among young people who rarely use cash. Wero itself was launched by large banking networks because they had no solution to compete with neo-banks such as Lydia, which was a pioneer in this type of service. France has its own payment network, Carte Bleue, which dates back to when the very first smart cards were introduced, but it is not European. The real problem is therefore not a lack of projects, banks or services, but a lack of interoperability, too many players and geographical fragmentation. Europe is not fast, but it has worked wonders with SEPA transfers. It needs to put in place a clear timetable imposing the interoperability of these services. The absence of plastic cards is absolutely not a problem, just look at WeChat, Alipay, etc.

Easy when shops start supporting them.

I've paid numerous time using the swiss counterpart, Twint, in small shops. For some like the farm I used to buy vegetables to it was their only supported payment besides cash because they deemed the card systems too expensive.

The same way chinese tourists can already pay with alipay in many retatail outlets in europe, you can already pay with such european systems on Aliexpress. More are probably comming.

It's for online payments only. You click on the wero button on a website/app, if on mobile takes you to your banking app (on desktop, you scan a QR code), you do MFA on your banking app and confirm, and the payment is done.

Wero are not in the business of issuing cards, though obviously they could get into that business - just like UnionPay did in China. I suspect there would be a lot of inertia there, as card payment fees are capped in Europe anyway.

By letting merchants receive payments from customers without going through Visa and Mastercard?

Granted, the FAQ entry is rather light in details:

https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/39413057671...

> So Wero is not a credit card

Neither are visa/MC for the most part. Mostly debit. ;) this isn’t really about the card anyway but the network behind it.

This is likely to be similar to the existing European payment systems just wider in scope. There are a bunch already it’s just fragmented and country specific. Sepa wero ideal girocard crates bancaires