It’s also a response to the ECB’s digital Euro, a way that banks show the central bank “hey, we the banks are actually capable of creating a good EU-level payment system”.
It's barely launched in more than 5 EU countries. It's not part of the specs or requirements to only be available in the Google / Apple ecosystem.
but at the moment, it is. so he's right to be nervous. from one american duopoly to another.
but i share your optimism that they eventually allow this to work without them.
Perfect is the enemy of good as always. Having a system that is currently available on the two biggest mobile platforms for the launch (Covering probably 99.9% of consumers) is already much better than piping every single transaction through two US mega corps.
https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116215341782832097 https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116125936995037426
> Good morning, it's not "our" fault. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it—Wero is a service offered by EPI, and they've decided to take a "mobile-first" approach for now. Warm regards from Bochum!
As for the prospects of ever seeing banking apps outside of android/ios, there is only https://www.das-parlament.de/wirtschaft/finanzen/wir-bauen-m...
> What about smartphones that run on free and open-source software instead of the commercial operating systems used by the iPhone or Google? > Tanja Müller-Ziegler: This market is still very much a niche one. There are still too few providers, which is why it’s hardly worth offering banking apps for these devices.
> Perfect is the enemy of good as always.
I'm no expert on iDEAL, but being 20 years old, it's older than Android and iOS and presumably supported web based payments from the very beginning. I really don't understand why nowadays people seem to think that app exclusivity is somehow a natural starting point. It's a relatively recent invention.
That's hardly a confirmation that it will never be possible ("for now"). It seems like a fair tradeoff for a launch when almost everyone has a smartphone and that's already enforced like that for many parts of life (I'm not saying it's great, but it's a valid tradeoff when alternative options exist) like banking or public transport where the happy path often is a phone app.
It's fine as long as we have alternatives, but if online shops were to start to phase out SEPA payments in favor of Wero and Wero-only shops were to start popping it, it would be a real problem.
Btw the solution already exists: It's still relatively small scale but GNU Taler is live in Switzerland. The EU could make regulation to make it easier to adopt at any time it wants.
Give it some time to mature before writing it off.
>It is not possible to send Wero payments to friends & family via a web browser or on a computer
https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...
So its pretty clear they have no plans to support plain browser access. Which is a very strange decision to me.
So does Wero, as I cited in another comment:
The Wero app is available only for account holders from the German bank Postbank and the French bank La Banque Postale.
Are you a customer of another Wero-enabled bank? If so, you can easily use Wero within your banking app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.epicompany....
It's not the same system.
I said that it is based on the iDEAL system:
Wero is built on the foundation of iDEAL, backed by 16 major European banks – including the Dutch banks behind iDEAL.
The European Payments Initiative (EPI) acquired the Dutch payment system iDEAL with the aim of making it the standard payment solution across all European countries. [...] The first step is to make iDEAL the standard in France and Germany because the countries don’t yet have a standard payment system for e-commerce, according to AD. Customers in the Netherlands will notice little of this.
https://nltimes.nl/2023/04/25/dutch-payment-processor-ideal-... / https://www.ad.nl/economie/online-betalingssysteem-ideal-wor...