alt Hacker NewsWero is such a valuable asset for Europe and couldn't have come at a better time.
It's built on the excellent SEPA system, which standardized bank transfers and "Lastschrift" in Europe. SEPA itself got a huge upgrade last year with mandatory instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers between European checking accounts.
Both of those allowed Wero to happen as a final abstract top layer, meaning: the UX of sending money to an email address with the security and convenience of bank transfers. And everything is built collaboratively on top of European banking infrastructure.
No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
And before some says: "Well, now the government controls everything!": They already did, since... Ever. Now its one less entity with that access and one that can be (hopefully) controlled and changed by a majority.
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But now every bank needs to support and implement it separately. My bank doesn't so far which is annoying.
> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
Officially you need a Google or Apple account to download a wero capable app from their stores, and Google and Apple can always delete all wero capable apps from their stores like for example with Russian sanctioned banks.
Some banking apps work on non - google play controlled android smartphones, but always only accidentally. Some banks like for example Consorbank already crack down on "sideloading" their app at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/Consorsbank/comments/1p909w1/commen...
> instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers
Interesting, I didn't know that. Now, why would anyone want to do a non-instant transfer, then (short of not knowing about it like in my case)? Doesn't this mandate basically make all transfers instant?
> the UX of sending money to an email address
> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.
Who owns domain names (which emails require)? No, don't say people do, people don't own domain names, they lease them, and it's not a right either.
I frequently run into failed SEPA transfers. At least three per month out of ~200. So it could use some more stability for my use case.
In all fairness, I also have a couple of VISA payments that fail every month.
Note that Wero is amongs others based on the Dutch iDEAL [1] system, which was introduced 21 years ago. Virtually every Dutch web shop supports iDEAL (and many only support iDEAL) as well as international payment services such as PayPal and Stripe. As a result, the vast majority of transactions of Dutch webshops go through iDEAL. It is really a super-nice frictionless system.
iDEAL also supports P2P payments through Tikkie (ABN AMRO) or the payment request option of other banks. You basically show a QR code or send a link and the person paying goes through the iDEAL flow to transfer the money. Tikkie (and the other bank's similar and compatible systems) have been one of the primary methods for P2P transfers for many years now.
I am really happy that we are getting the same system across multiple countries now. Contactless payments through Wero are also planned, so that we can finally become independent of Google/Apple Pay for contactless payments using a phone.
[1] EPI purchased the Dutch iDEAL and Belgian Payconiq and mentioned on multiple occasions that Wero is based on the foundations of iDEAL. They kept iDEAL running as a separate system in order not to disturb it during the upbringing of Wero, but iDeal is going to migrated to Wero the coming period.