Wero app launched – the European Paypal competitor

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From November 25, Postbank customers will also be able to send and receive money via the European smartphone payment service Wero using their cell phone number or e-mail address. Postbank is thus joining the system, which has so far been limited to savings banks and cooperative banks in Germany, three months later than originally planned. It brings with it around twelve million potential users.

At the same time as Postbank, the European Payments Initiative (EPI), which is developing the Wero platform on behalf of the participating banks, plans to release its own app. Its use is initially mandatory for Postbank customers if they want to participate in Wero. Wero will also be added as a function to Postbank's banking app, similar to the practice of savings banks and cooperative banks. However, the parent company Deutsche Bank is leaving the exact timing open.

Conversely, customers of savings banks and cooperative banks will not be able to use the Wero app for the time being. According to the German Savings Banks and Giro Association and DZ Bank, which is in charge of the cooperative banks, this is planned, but neither gave an exact date during a presentation to representatives of the press in Frankfurt on Thursday.

Wero app

The structure of the independent Wero app is recognizably based on existing payment apps in other European countries such as Twint (Switzerland) or Mobile Pay (Denmark), but its somewhat playful visual design makes it visibly independent. In addition to customers of the German Postbank, only customers of the French Banque Postale will initially be able to use the app. Customers of savings banks and Volksbanks as well as the other affiliated institutions in France and Belgium are sent to the respective banking apps by Wero via a deep link upon registration. In the future, however, it should also be possible to store several bank details, so that Wero would effectively become the wallet that its creators want it to be.

The interface initially allows users to send money or request money from other users in a similar way to PayPal. It is also possible to generate a QR code that the payer or recipient can scan. During a demonstration by an EPI employee, this looked quite smooth; we will provide our own test when the app is officially launched.

Just like Wero in the banking apps, the app also uses the SEPA real-time transfer from the current account, where the money has to get from the sender to the recipient in a maximum of ten seconds. The same fee is charged per incoming or outgoing transaction as for a standard transfer. If a customer's account model includes an unlimited number of free transfers, there are no additional costs for these. For example, if the individual transaction is priced at 35 cents, an outgoing or incoming Wero payment will also cost 35 cents.

Security and data protection

The level of security is also comparable to that of a SEPA real-time transfer. The Wero app uses the cell phone numbers or e-mail addresses to communicate the account details of the two parties involved in the background. The banks then process the actual transfer between themselves. In private person to private person (P2P) mode, which is currently the only option available, transfers are therefore final and cannot be reversed – Users of "Friends and Family" on PayPal are already familiar with this rule. Customer and buyer protection is only planned once online payments are also possible.

The same rules as for bank transfers also apply in terms of data protection. Banks may only evaluate transaction data with consent and may not pass it on to third parties. According to the participating banks, the transactions are processed exclusively on European servers.

In the Wero app, –, you can also make your name partially anonymous when paying by cell phone number or email address, just like in the savings banks' app –; when paying by QR code, no name should be transmitted at all. This is useful at flea markets, for example, when dealing with people you don't know. Partial anonymization is currently permanently set in the cooperative banks' banking app. However, the sender's IBAN is transmitted for private transactions in Germany. This corresponds to the practice for normal transfers and differs from France, for example, where this is not the case.

Status and outlook

Currently, users can still only send money privately via Wero. By mid-2025, the payment method should then be available for online retailers and, as "P2Pro", for self-employed people such as fitness trainers or music teachers. An initial pilot project is currently underway for online retailers. By mid-2026, EPI and the participating banks want to bring Wero to store checkouts. Further functions for use in retail are also planned, such as payment deferrals or installment payments. The Wero app is also set to become a carrier for the European ID wallet.

At the event in Frankfurt, the bank representatives reiterated that these two expansion stages are the main motive behind Wero. The aim is to counterbalance the US payment methods, which dominate national payment transactions in many European countries and whose systems are almost unrivaled for payments abroad. In addition, the aim is to provide merchants with a payment method that is not only transnational but also cheaper.

However, it is by no means certain that this plan will work. The major credit card companies are also introducing a wallet with "Click to Pay"; PayPal is also the market leader in online retail and P2P payments, especially in Germany.

The number of connected banks is also set to increase further. ING, for example, is currently planning to connect its German customers to Wero in the first half of 2025. Deutsche Bank customers are set to follow in mid-2025. In Belgium, all remaining member banks are to join in the course of 2025, with the Netherlands and Luxembourg following in 2026. The Netherlands in particular wants to securely integrate its national online payment method iDEAL, which has a market share of around 80 percent there, into Wero first.

The savings banks and bank representatives present at the press event in Frankfurt also provided specific user figures for the first time. According to Joachim Schmalzl from the German Savings Banks and Giro Association, the savings banks have 82,000 registered Wero users, which is "on target". According to Thomas Ullrich from the central institution DZ Bank, the cooperative banks have around 300,000 registrations. Across Europe, 14 million Wero users are said to be registered, the lion's share of which come from France. Since the end of September, numerous banks there have been connected to Wero, bringing their mobile payment method Paylib with them. A total of eight million transactions have been counted across Europe since the market launch of Wero.

When announcing the figures on Thursday, EPI and the banks involved once again emphasized that they would regard the first few months as a start-up phase. Before the system scales, the first banks should have joined. The aim is to avoid major failures during the "complex account integration" and to be better able to cope with delays caused by technical problems (such as those reported for the Wero app and Postbank).

(mon)