cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/12165459
For most Dutch shoppers, iDEAL has simply been how you pay online. Since 26 October, customers of 11 Dutch banks have been able to pay merchants online with Wero, the wallet run by the European Payments Initiative (EPI). The banks are ABN AMRO, ASN Bank, bunq, BUUT, Finom, ING, Knab, Nationale-Nederlanden, Rabobank, Triodos Bank and Van Lanschot Kempen. Merchants can now start switching through their payment service providers, and EPI aims to complete the migration by the end of 2027.
EPI’s chief executive, Martina Weimert, described seeing Wero inside Dutch shareholders’ banking apps as “definitely the milestone” the company had been working towards.
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Wero sits inside a broader European debate about reducing reliance on non-European card schemes and wallets. EPI is backed by 18 banks and payment providers. The planned European Network for Payments aims to connect schemes serving around 130 million users in 13 countries. Meanwhile, the ECB is preparing the digital euro. It has pointed to a pilot in 2027 and potential first issuance in 2029, subject to legislation.
The two are often presented as complementary, a private bank-led wallet and public money underneath. In practice, banks, merchants and regulators will need to decide how much overlap the market can sustain. They will also need to settle who bears the cost of acceptance and integration.
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I’m curious too, especially because this in effect means it relies on US technology and services. If the US government were to cut off Master Card and Visa and then presses the off switch on those app stores or Google Play Services for Europe, you’re not going to be able to pay, whether it’s through Wero or through a US-run credit/debit card.
We have the same problem in Switzerland, we’ve had something like Wero for a decade (it’s called Twint) but the damn thing runs on Google Cloud Platform and is an app that’s exclusive to iOS and Android.
Many dutch banks did offer ideal in their onlinebanking webinterface and allowed using it with a hardware tan generator (“scanner”). Several banks like ing and asn have already cut off their web users from ideal | wero. Some others like rabobank and abn amro have said the previous partial transition would not change anything with regards to their webinterface: https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/31/ing-scanner-users-unable-use-wero-payments-ideal-switch
However that partial transition was to put some parts of the backend on the wero infrastructure. This news right now is apparently the frontend part. It would be extremely interesting to know whether someone is still able to use the webinterface for actual full wero payments, either with or without activating the actual full wero in their banking app in parallel. So far I have not seen anyone post about this. And by now I just don’t expect journalists to ask questions about a world outside Google and Apple.