Wero: The biggest shakeup in the European payments landscape since SEPA?

‍European consumers love their local payment methods, but it's the European merchants that pay the price for them.

Major eCommerce markets like the US or China rely on a handful of dominant payment schemes - from card networks such as Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover to the digital wallets that sit on top of them: Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal/Venmo. But Europe consists of dozens of deeply entrenched local methods, each one a product of regional banking systems, regulatory culture, and consumer habits.

For example, in the Netherlands, iDEAL processes around 60–65% of online payments. Cards (credit and debit) represent barely 14%. If you're an online business hoping to sell to consumers in the Netherlands, offering IDEAL as an option in your checkout is non-negotiable.

Across the continent, the story is similar.  

In Belgium, Bancontact process billions of transactions a year and are the leading domestic scheme. In Poland, account‑to‑account schemes such as BLIK already handle most eCommerce transactions and are projected to reach roughly three‑quarters of online payments by 2030.  

Across the Nordics, local wallets dominate. In Denmark 71% of consumers have used MobilePay for a recent online purchase, while in Norway and Sweden roughly three‑quarters and two‑thirds of consumers respectively use domestic wallets Vipps and Swish.  

As merchants or payment providers, we've told ourselves a comforting story about why this happened. Local methods succeeded in Europe because they reflect local consumer preferences. But the reality is that Europe's payment fragmentation is profitable for everyone except for the businesses operating across these markets.

The fragmentation tax

European consumer trust in their local payment methods has been built over many years. In many markets, these methods aren't "alternatives" to traditional payment methods — they're the default way consumers pay.

According to Statista, nearly 60% of European consumers are more likely to complete an online purchase when offered their preferred local payment method. While Deloitte research shows that merchants offering a broader mix of payment methods can see conversion rate improvements of up to 20%.

Despite the deeply entrenched loyalty toward local payment methods, cards still dominate at the aggregate level in Europe. In 2023, cards accounted for ~56% of non-cash transactions overall (ECB), with Visa and Mastercard underpinning most digital consumer spend across the region.  

The result is a structural trap for merchants seeking to expand into EU: to operate in markets where consumers overwhelmingly prefer local payment methods, they must add all of them and still offer Visa and Mastercard to maintain reach, conversion, and cross-border operability.  

Why previous unification attempts failed

Wero isn't the first attempt to fix Europe's historical reliance on foreign schemes. The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) launched in the late 2000s with the aim of harmonizing European payments. While it achieved unification for bank transfers, solutions for instant consumer checkout have lagged.  

Since then, multiple consortiums have attempted pan-European payment schemes. However, most of them failed to achieve their full goal because the strategy was to federate existing systems, rather than consolidate them.

For example, the the Euro Alliance of Payment Schemes (EAPS), launched in 2007 as a consortium of European bank and interbank networks, aimed to create a pan‑European debit card scheme by linking existing national card infrastructure. Despite representing over 200 million cards and nearly 200,000 ATMs across Europe, EAPS was abandoned sometime after 2013, undermined by fragmented national priorities, difficulty achieving true pan‑European scale, and intense competition from global card schemes.

Another example is the Monnet Project, launched in 2008 by around 20 major European banks to build a unified debit card network. It collapsed by 2012, defeated by technical complexity, limited adoption across borders, and prohibitive implementation costs.  

With every European country maintaining their own infrastructure, governance, and economics, merely agreeing to interoperate doesn't eliminate fragmentation. It just adds another layer of complexity. The European Payments Initiative (EPI), which created Wero, takes a different tack: rather than stitching together national schemes, it builds a new unified digital wallet and network on SEPA Instant rails to compete directly with both domestic solutions and global incumbents.

The Wero promise

Created by EPI and backed by 16 major European banks - including ABN AMRO (Netherlands), BNP Paribas (France), and ING, plus payment providers like Worldline and Nexi, - Wero aims to replace decades of fragmentation with a single, European-owned alternative to Visa, Mastercard, and big-tech wallets like PayPal.  

For the first time, customers in France and the Netherlands can use the same method with the same checkout experience. ("I'll send you a Wero" is already becoming shorthand for settling a bill.)

But Wero's roadmap is a deliberate shift from a simple A2A payment method to a fully-fledged European omnichannel wallet.

At its core is a single consent-based architecture that underpins every payment flow — eCommerce, mCommerce, and point-of-sale via QR and, later, NFC. This unified model supports immediate payments, P2P transfers, subscriptions, and event-dependent transactions.

Surrounding the payments layer is an expanding suite of value-added services: embedded merchant loyalty programs, integrated digital identity and ticketing (EUDI-compliant), and a forthcoming buy-now-pay-later framework. These extensions are designed to turn Wero into more than a payment button, but a preferred European wallet, merging payments with identity, loyalty, and everyday utility.

The rollout is structured in phased waves. Germany, France and Belgium lead the eCommerce deployment in 2026, while the Netherlands and Luxembourg follow through large-scale migrations.  

As of early 2026, iDEAL is being co-branded as "iDEAL | Wero", with backend migration beginning mid-year, and full replacement scheduled by late 2027 — one of the largest payment-scheme transitions Europe has seen.

Wero isn't demanding that consumers change their habits or acclimatize to a new experience. It's maintaining the core components of what European consumers already use and trust with the added value of cross-border reach. By acquiring successful local solutions like iDEAL and Payconiq and folding them into the Wero brand, EPI is deliberately phasing out strong national brands.  

For merchants, the Wero promise is one integration reaching multiple markets, single reconciliation (no national clearing mazes), and real-time, low-cost rails - the truly first unified European payment experience.  

Building a unified European market

As European payment sovereignty initiatives mature, the European payments landscape will look fundamentally different. Europe could have the modern payment infrastructure it has lacked for years: more unified, sovereign, and designed around the needs of its merchants and consumers, not just the constraints of legacy global networks.

Earlier this year, Nuvei was among the first payment processors to complete a Wero transaction in a testing environment and is now one of the first platforms to begin processing merchant transactions.

Before Wero, expanding across Europe meant integrating payment methods country by country. Each integration required custom code, separate certifications, distinct test environments, and its own set of scheme rules. Each demanded reconciliation across different settlement timelines, dispute models, and reporting formats.

With schemes like Wero, merchants can connect once and unlock access to millions of users across the entire European market.  

Guy Douek is General Manager, Europe, at Nuvei, where he steers regional strategy and operations to deliver seamless payment experiences for merchants across the continent.