The governor of the Central Bank of Sweden comments our payment systems.
Here’s an AI translation of the text into English:
“Given the geopolitical situation, it is important to create European systems in a number of areas. This is according to Riksbank Governor Erik Thedéen in an interview with Ekot’s Saturday program, where he emphasizes that Sweden’s payment systems should not be as dependent on the USA as they have been. As an example, he points out that the two dominant credit card issuers, Mastercard and Visa, are American. ‘It is probably wise to consider that we should also have European or Swedish systems that function in case the American ones do not,’ he says. According to the central bank governor, Swish is ‘a certain complement.’ He also highlights that other countries, such as Denmark, have their own national credit cards.”
Wero is not widely supported yet, it’s not even finished yet, it doesn’t have feature parity with existing solutions. Compared to its predecessor, Giropay, it’s also rather intransparent, in a “just trust our app, bro” kind of way, with little in the way of open standards.
It needs support from every single bank to work (in stark contrast to PayPal, btw), and that support requires quite a lot of development and maintenance effort on the part of the bank. Parent poster (BarHocker) said many European banks already support it, but the practical reality is most of them don’t, and largely didn’t have any plans to, either. The number of supporting banks is artificially inflated by the fact that the German Volksbanken/Raiffeisenbanken and the Sparkassen, respectively are technically hundreds of small regional banks.
This requirement to have direct support from the individual banks is, the way I see it, the main reason why Giropay failed. If Wero has the exact same problem, I don’t see why it would succeed where Giropay did not.
I do still hope for it, though.