I'm a happy GLS Bank customer, and I've just learned about its involvement in Taler. Pretty awesome.
Europe desperately needs its own digital payment solutions to reduce its dependence on US companies and its exposure to sanctions that could target EU citizens if the president has a bad day.
GLS is also on board with Wero, which, unfortunately, hasn't seen big adoption yet.
No they are not? You might be thinking of cheque-style payments (recipient pulls, with proof of the sender's authorisation) versus giro-style payments (sender pushes, with their own authorisation). The latter are obviously much more secure.
Do you pay your groceries with SEPA instant transfers?
Merchants can't just slap a QR code with their banking details on their website or cash registers. Wero offers a convenient layer on top of SEPA transfers, and you can argue EPC QR codes are already enough (though most people would disagree).
Additionally, Wero provides a full payment solution that's integrated with many third party processors, and is basically an evolution of Payconiq and iDEAL. Sure, it does use SEPA rails, but there's a lot more to it. And that's the part that will need to interoperate with more than a dozen mobile wallets in Europe, inside and outside the Eurozone.
Me personally, I use my bank card, which I assume registers as Mastercard.
I also have the option to pay by scanning a non-QR non-SEPA-Instant code generated by my bank app, through some other third-party system.
At some stores, but not the supermarket, I have the option to pay by SEPA Instant. It's more common with online payments, but a store could also accept it. The main problem is that SEPA Instant payments aren't always instant (thanks to USA-imposed KYC/AML rules), and if one isn't, then I'd have to come back later to collect the goods, or pay twice and hope to get a refund later.
That's why it's built on SEPA instant that is written into EU law, requiring 10 second transfer times, and the banks have incentives to support these things (they often own it, but also because it creates lock-in effects of focusing business in one bank).
In Poland everyone uses Blik, recently even Revolut (a popular pan-EU neobank) started supporting it for transactions in Poland. It’s trusted, available for 10+y and generally a successful project.
I don’t think it ever tried expanding outside of Poland though.
When it comes to Wero—I’m not sure. My bank recently replaced “payconiq” with it, and I don’t see any benefits or new features and the app seems amateurish.
I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
banks have two ways to offer non-iDeal Wero: Either in their own app, or via the Wero app.
I think it's super interesting to see how Wero connects all the separate instant payment schemes. It launched in Germany and France, replacing giropay in Germany. Now it first rebrands iDeal as iDeal|Wero, and plans to replace it with regular Wero. And in Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Italy, they don't push the Wero brand or technology, but instead they build interoperability with the local systems.
Like someone else who made the "SEPA in trenchcoat" comment, it's all built on tying phonenumbers (universally available and easily connectible) to bank accounts and relying on SEPA instant for the money.
The only thing to make sure is that QR-codes,etc that are often tied to apps will be supported for routing/connecting between different apps.
Like the Swedish Swish app when asking for money produces a QR-code that says, A+(my-phone-number) , if that's universally recognized by the apps as an ask-request then an Italian app scanning my QR code will be prompted send money and the Italian system will query the Swedish counterparts what account is registered to that phone and then just send the money over SEPA when the request finishes.
Most banks integrate Wero into their online banking app, but some (e.g. mine) use the dedicated app for Wero (It's just called wero on google play and iOS). You still sign up with your bank account though.
The critical feature that Wero needs is adding money to your account balance via SEPA instant or credit card. That way users without participating bank accounts can join.
> I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
AFAIK due to SEPA we are already much better integrated. And with SEPA URLs (QR or NFC) plus instant transactions we already have all we need deployed EU wide. IMO the European banks are just over engineering everything.
The real benefit is "one to rule them all". It's so much more useful to have one single network that everybody uses even if the service doesn't have all the bells and whistles, than it is to have to use a patchwork of 1000 different networks even if they're stuffed with fancy features.
Which is 99.9% of the users and probably not a blocker for main stream adoption especially if it’s not the only way to pay (Bank transfer, cash etc all still works).
Edge case or not, I do consider a dependency on user-hostile proprietary software owned and controlled by foreign companies a serious problem by nature. Most people not caring doesn’t make it any better.
True, but at least with GLS, you can run their app even on rooted Android phones (with Magisks DenyList configured) and use the app's built-in NFC payment functionality. This is super nice, as Google Wallets NFC payments don't work on rooted phones.
I don't know what the situation is like on GrapheneOS, though, as I run LineageOS.
which one of these lets me choose the hardware and promises to let me do so indefinitely? I run sailfish os, for example, and hsbc decided to cut off my internet banking for it
Europe desperately needs its own digital payment solutions to reduce its dependence on US companies and its exposure to sanctions that could target EU citizens if the president has a bad day.
GLS is also on board with Wero, which, unfortunately, hasn't seen big adoption yet.
I really hope Taler takes off.