[Coeur]

Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.

Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.

https://empsa.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...

[Ninn]

Like sepa, this initiative can be forced by law and made open rather than tanken hostage by large cooperates, which may then exclude parts of the market.

[HunOL]

Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law. Is Wero really a success? According to this article, in 2024 it processed over €7.5 billion.

Polish BLIK, which is not even mentioned in the article and which has joined the EuroPA Alliance, processed €83 billion in 2024, with a 30% y/y increase in H1 2025. I understand that BLIK is much older, but it invested significant effort and money in marketing and promotions while delivering a good user experience. BLIK is now trying to expand to Romania and Slovakia, yet Wero is getting all the hype on Hacker News. Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently. Is the only “European” solution one that comes from Western Europe?

[lovelesscx]

One problem I see with some of the EMPSA systems, is that if you're a developer and - if you don't have a company behind you, you're pretty much shit out of luck trying to integrate any of these payment solutions.

That have at least been my experience, trying to integrate Vipps in Scandinavia.

[ksimukka]

What was your experience like trying to integrate with Vipps?

[Pooge]

We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.

[tuetuopay]

Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).

The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).

[Kelteseth]

> Bluecode

Never heard about this before, and I'm a German.

[rcbdev]

In Austria EPS is also very commonly used.

[wiseowise]

Wero is iDeal.

[mechazawa]

I wish it was still just iDeal. The rebranding was done very poorly and the things that they added like accounts are just bad ideas

[t0mas88]

I thought they were interconnecting all those ideal-like systems from different countries and then rebranding to Wero? So the tech may be different per area but they all interconnect and the UX is the same.

But maybe I misunderstood and other places are actually replacing tech.

[tokai]

>Vipps (rest of Scandinavia)

This is wrong.

[ksimukka]

Vipps MobilePay is in Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden.

That is almost all Nordic countries, and all of Scandinavia.