Wero: The wallet that’s changing payments forever

Caroline Béguin: It’s really nice to have you both on the set on Fintrends podcast to talk about WERO. I have a question for you, Fabrice, to introduce the podcast. I’d like to know the vision behind WERO, and also why this is the right moment for Europe? 

Fabrice Le Gall: Yes. So WERO is part of a broader European vision after the SEPA in 2012, which streamlined payment flows between financial institutions in the Eurozone. WERO is now addressing the fragmentation of payments habit services across Europe. Why is it a good moment for us? Imagine a Europe where every euro spent in our economy stays within our economy, where our financial institutions are not dictated by external or foreign companies, but built by European people for European citizens. With a payment system set up by European people, we gain more than financial independence. We gain control, we gain trust, the data is regulated by our own rules, and we decide on our payment infrastructure. This isn’t just about payment transactions. It’s about sovereignty, innovation in order to build a stronger Europe. 

Caroline Béguin: On a more technical note, Nicolas, can you tell us what makes WERO technically feasible at scale? 

Nicolas De Genot: Yeah, sure. I mean, I believe that WERO is feasible for many things, but one of the main reasons is that, first of all, it lies on top of instant payment rails, so that’s something that people already use, are accustomed to doing an instant payment for the past few years. Across Europe in different markets, it’s been around for over five or ten years. So reusing something that already exists makes it easier and feasible. We’re not creating a brand-new way of payment. It exists already. Then the other element is mainly the fact that it’s also reusing the same applications from, from banks. So you don’t need to also rebuild a new application from scratch and get people to use it on board and start learning about it. You’re reusing your same app that customers are accustomed to, and you just enable a new feature for payments. Customers already are aware of this type of wallet payments. So even if it’s not technical, the fact that we have a lot of information from wallets across the globe makes it easier for customers to also feel safe about using WERO. The fact that it comes from a European initiative makes it also more feasible. There’s more trust on the system. So as a consumer, you would trust more this type of payment rails than any other because there is a backup behind, and there’s a lot of banks already using it, so that makes it easier as well to say there’s enough volume today to get more merchants, to get more people excited about WERO and using it more and more. So the speed to market is always there. You don’t need to rebuild everything. You don’t slow TCO because you don’t have to, again, rebuild instant payments or rebuild a new app. You’re just adding features to it. And cross-border interoperability is also key because you’re able to now pay in other countries. Like before, you were not able to do this. And also people from other countries can pay in your own country with their own apps. So that’s also a key element of why it is feasible today to say that WERO is the future.

Caroline Béguin: EPI already works with Tier 1 banks, and I wanna know for a Tier 2 or a Tier 3 bank, what are the practical options for joining WERO? 

Fabrice Le Gall: Yeah, of course. So let me clarify a misunderstanding. So we are talking about EPI and WERO. EPI is the European Payment Initiative. It’s the scheme. It’s the regulatory and operational framework that financial institutions decided to join. And WERO, it’s the commercial brand of the payment services offered by EPI, whether it’s P2P to send payment between consumers or payment between individuals and merchants in e-commerce or in a POS solution. To join EPI, each institution must decide which kind of license fits their needs. It could be an issuing license to enable its customers to use WERO. We are talking about consumer PSP licenses. It could also be an acceptance license to allow merchants to accept a WERO payment. We say it’s an acceptor PSP license.Next to that, EPI offers two levels of membership. So there is the principal member license. As a principal member, you actively take part in the workshop that shapes the rule book and the roadmap. Institutions aren’t just passive implementers, they are co-creators of this framework. This gives them the opportunity to align European standards with real market needs and their own strategic priority. The second type of license, it’s what we call an associate member. As an associate member, of course, you have a more limited involvement in the scheme, but benefit from a lower licensing cost compared to principal members. 

Caroline Béguin: Nicolas, can you tell us where do banks usually stumble when enabling WERO? 

Nicolas De Genot: Yeah. I would say there’s maybe a top four action or point of attention to say that banks have to have in mind, mainly around orchestration, identity and managing rapid changes for the roadmaps. So teams often underestimate the complexity of orchestration that many different systems that you have to do, the wallet logic, the fraud checks, internal data services, all sitting between the user’s click and the instant payment rail. So there’s a lot of things happening in the middle that you need to be aware of and need to be conscious that you need a powerful tool to be able to manage that and avoid user drop-offs in that sense. You also have a second, let’s say, attention point around cross-border identity mapping, like linking your phone, your email to your IBAN across different borders. For peer-to-peer it could be complex, especially when you factor the data quality, the governance, and the layers needed for dispute handling at scale. You also have a high rate of evolution. So WERO is not static, of course. It’s gonna evolve. There’s a roadmap and new features coming in, so banks will have to face that evolution as well continuous change as they move from peer-to-peer to e-commerce to advanced payment plans, and soon as well, POS. So they need a proper roadmap to be able to do this. It’s not a one-off project and then you’re just waiting. You always have to be actively doing changes. And of course, there’s also the merchant experience gap. So to drive initial adoption, banks need more than just the payment button. They essentially need more features that push merchants and also users to start going to that merchant to pay. So visibility, of course reconciliation tools, dispute management tools, all of that is usually afterthoughts. We think about those features after we’ve launched many times, but those are also key elements so that the customer trusts us, trusts the whole service and will continue to use it. So those are the main key factors of attention that I would say today. And of course, our product solves most of those by providing pre-built orchestration, governed proxy services, version and conformance pack. So banks focus on the go live and the growth and the UX experience, and we handle mainly the back-end rewiring in that sense. 

Caroline Béguin: Talking about new features, procure-to-pay is now live. So what is next in terms of rollout and merchant adoption, Fabrice? 

Fabrice Le Gall: Yes, you’re right. P2P is live. Live with 45 million European citizens. That means that they are reachable, so they can either receive or send P2P money transfers. We have around the three core markets, 30, 35 members that are mostly principal members, but we are starting to onboard associate members. And it’s just the beginning, of course, because several major institutions, especially in France, are still to be onboarded, and we are also planning to expand. We have a geographical expansion on the roadmap. Our playground is the Eurozone, so theoretically, we could onboard every country. But for the time being, the e-commerce launch is underway. We are seeing the first transaction in Germany. Belgium will follow in January, and the time will be for France in October 2026. Please also note that in the summer of 2026, some users involved in the pilot will be able to pay in store using their own WERO Wallet. 

Caroline Béguin: What about you, Nicolas? What is your product’s role here, and what do banks actually buy from SBS? 

Nicolas De Genot: Yeah. To keep it simple, they buy just a turnkey API solution. So something that sits in front of their systems, in front of their instant payment rails to bring all the features from WERO, from API back to the user. So again, to give all this new payment experience back to the user, which is key for banks to be there. So if your customer wants to pay using WERO, you have to have it. You cannot not have it, right? And that’s the future. So again, API, apps facing API, so again to power the flows, peer-to-peer, peer-to-pro, e-commerce, pay, in-store payments, and also using different means of identifying who you’re paying, whether through a QR code or a proxy management. That’s something we give banks to allow them to just connect simply to those APIs and the flow will happen in the background. So we do all the orchestration. We do all the facing connector towards API, so that way we connect to API in a secure way and bring everything that we need to execute the full flow. And everything has to do with operational guardrails, security, telemetry, limiting, rate limiting, and we connect to your core banking systems as well to get those information and make sure that the system is safe. So again, it’s a turnkey solution to go from, “I only have instant payment,” to “I actually have a wallet WERO experience for my client that has all the features and all the availability of those pretty quickly.”

Caroline Béguin: Nicolas, you were talking about security, as well as compliance and trust. Security is critical when it comes to financial services. So I’m wondering, Fabrice, how is EPI addressing this at a scheme level? 

Fabrice Le Gall: Of course, our first priority is to establish trust, and that’s exactly what we have done with the launch of our P2P services in 2024. Keep in mind that the WERO transaction consists in two key layers. We are an overlay acceptance layer between two parties. It’s managed by us, by the rule book, and implemented by the financial institution. And the second layer, it’s the settlement itself, the instant payment layer that it’s managed by the financial institution, by the banks. Both parties, where individual or merchant must have been onboarded by their own bank using their internal KYC process. So we, as a scheme, rely on the internal rules of our members to have all of the information about the users. A few days ago, the VoP has been implemented, and we, as EPI, already have implemented the verification of payee because if you want to use WERO, for example, if you type a phone number on either your mobile banking app or on the standalone app, WERO, that you have downloaded on the stores, you will type a phone number, and there is a lookup if the phone number or the proxy exists in our database. If it’s the case, it will show up who is on the line on the other side by showing the name with some obfuscation according to the internal rules of the bank. And if not, it will say so this proxy number is not reachable. So that means there is nobody on the other side. So that’s an element of truth for the users and for the settlement of the transaction itself. 

Caroline Béguin: What is different in your approach to security at the bank level, Nicolas? 

Nicolas De Genot: Just to retake the last point from Fabrice, I think mainly the verification of payee that comes behind every instant payment actually is bringing already a lot of trust and confidence of the consumer. So they know that in the back when they’re paying somebody, it has been verified that I’m paying the right person. So that already is pretty big from the business case perspective, let’s say. The customers understand that, and the fact that it’s also a known European initiative also brings trust and inherently security because you believe that the rule books, the specifications, and how that product has been thought about or created have come with already the highest levels of security, let’s say design in the background. But from the product perspective, we have mainly an approach of zero trust design. That means that every system, external, internal, connected to our different flows at different levels are verified, and we don’t trust anybody calling our system. So that means that every time somebody calls us, even if it’s internal products, we’re gonna re-ask, let’s say, their key to make sure that they’re the right service calling the right person to avoid somebody changing anything in the middle or an attack. We will know that something has been changed, and again, that’s the zero trust approach. We also have everything to do with security on mutual TLS. We have deterministic signatures to again make sure that everything that we’ve given is for the right person, and there’s no changes on those keys. Event logs, which allows you to, of course, have an audit trail, a strong audit trail. If something happens, there’s a dispute, you need to be able to prove who, what, at what time did what step. So that’s really important for banks and as well the resilience of the platform, the fact that it can handle spikes of traffic at different moments and holiday season, Christmas, or Black Fridays. It’s really important that your product is scalable and strong enough to be able to sustain that and by still doing all the security checks, even if you have 10, 20, 50 times more connection that second, your system still needs to perform all of those checks in a fast way to avoid taking any risks. So those are the main things. So security, you know, isn’t a gate. It’s a growth enabler, and customers will feel that this is a secure system, so they will continue to use it. 

Caroline Béguin: For the story, I am a user of WERO, and I’m very fond of it, so I wanna know what’s gonna be the future of WERO. So Fabrice, can you tell us what success looks like for WERO in the next 12 to 18 months? 

Nicolas De Genot: Well, over the next 12 months in 2026 we will have offered P2P, payment in addition to banks. So we will onboard new members for sure. We will roll out e-commerce in our three core markets, French, Germany, and Belgium, and complete the migration of the iDEAL payment services in the Netherlands. We will also finalize the migration from Payconiq in the Belgium area. And in the summer the WERO Wallet will become visible for some users in pilots with some merchants and banks. And at the end, we will prepare the onboarding of new countries like Austria. That’s not all. We will also have much greater clarity on the timeline for the implementation of interoperability between us, WERO, and the Europa initiative, which is a technical hub that we are writing the specification precisely. Europa is the joint of Portuguese, Spain, and Italy that will allow a Wero user to pay at a merchant store, be e-commerce or a POS, and a revert will be also possible. A Bizum user will be able to pay in a merchant that is onboarding in Wero. 

Caroline Béguin: From your perspective, Nicolas, what’s the long-term upside for banks investing in Wero? 

Nicolas De Genot: For us, we think Wero is fundamentally a platform move for banks. So once a wallet rail exists, they can layer new value, merchant services, loyalty programs subscriptions, data insights because they are controlling everything from end to end, so all under a strong European governance model. It’s about owning the daily habits again being the app customers use for peer-to-peer, checkout, and in-store payments. Fundamentally improved unit economics by shifting high volume payments away from legacy card fees. EPI expands across more markets. As Fabrice just said, the same as Wero integration scales with total reach. So the more markets they reach, the more places your clients can actually go and pay or transfer money. So that automatically gives them a broader reach. So our mission is to compress that journey from supporting instant payments to delivering a monetizable wallet-grade experience. It’s just not compliance, it’s growth, you know, with control. That’s what we believe. And everything that is on the roadmap from EPI will help banks achieve more, and that’s where we’ll continue to, you know, improve our solution in that same level of that roadmap with every single new country. Interoperability, as Fabrice said, is key as well because it allows customers to quickly gain access to other markets, like we said, in Spain with users using Bizum. Okay. So they’ll be able to also use Wero payments. So merchants in both countries can also earn a lot more from tourism and customers coming from other countries that they can pay with the same app in the same merchants. So everybody wins in this ecosystem. 

Caroline Béguin: Thanks to you for your insights. I’d like to wrap up this podcast with one final thought. What is one thing you want a bank executive to remember after this conversation? 

Fabrice Le Gall: Well, for Europe to feel united in payment, the user must feel it too. So Wero made that possible. So for a bank, you don’t need to wait. The path to join is already there. 

Caroline Béguin: What about you, Nicolas? 

Nicolas De Genot: Yeah. I think that understanding our clients, which are our banks, we understand the amount of work they have in different sectors for different products, a lot of regulation coming their way, so they have a lot of things to do on a daily basis. So for Wero, we believe that we can be their best allies to, again, launch fast, scale, and stay compliant without having to rebuild from scratch. So if they want to go this path, they can think about us, and we can help them go to market faster. 

Caroline Béguin: Thanks to you both for your insights. If you want to know more about Wero, open banking, and the road to real-time payments in Europe, stay connected with SBS and EPI. 

Nicolas De Genot: Thank you, Caroline. Thank you, Fabrice. 

Fabrice Le Gall: Thank you, Caroline. Thank you, Nicolas.