[tefkah]

Since the other guy wasn't particularly helpful, i'll try to add some context (mostly through my knowledge of iDeal, the Dutch payment system which Wero is based on).

You're right that it's a bit confusing, as Wero's marketing is mostly focused on P2P transfer usecases, ie like US's Venmo/Cashapp, which as you note we can already do with SEPA transfers. Wero does have a small benefit in that case, as it's slightly more secure (you don't need to share your bank account, and there's a dedicated app that most Western Europeans will soon be familiar with).

The bigger benefit I think is as a unified e-commerce solution. While Wero is not directly an EU initiative, it's still supported by the EU commission. In general a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating EU financial/economic news is that one of the main things the EU tries to do is strengthen and protect their "single market": they want to make the flow of commerce within EUs borders as seamless as possible.

Having a unified ecommerce payment solution, so that you can eg just as easily order goods from German webshops as a Frenchman as you can from a French one (barring shipping etc) is in the EUs interest. Of course it's also in the banks that put forward this initiative's interest.

But, speaking as a consumer: this rules! iDeal is really nice, much nicer to use than credit cards or PayPal imo. I think it's easy to see why you would prefer a dedicated payment system in ecommerce rather than plain SEPA transfers (which most shops don't support) or credit cards, but in case that's not clear:

- Faster checkouts

- Don't need to share bank account numbers/sensitive credit card info

- Fees are much lower than credit cards (at least for iDeal its fractions of a cent per transaction: https://ideal.nl/en/ideal-fees)

- (Coming) built in support for subscriptions

Hope that gave a bit of an idea!

[nicbou]

That was super helpful, thanks! Germany is just starting to accept credit cards. I hope that this enables digital payments for small transactions where cash is still king.

I hope it works well for visitors and recent immigrants. It can be surprisingly hard to open a bank account in your first few months in Germany, and I hope it won't leave people out of that new infrastructure.

Let's see how it goes!