Speaking on The Pat Kenny Show, Lagarde underscored Europe’s dependence on foreign digital payment infrastructure. “Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Alipay are all controlled by American or Chinese companies,” she noted, arguing, “We should make sure there is a European offer.”
The standard bank transfer takes at least a day as you said, but the instant one is regulated to take less than 10 seconds in total (in practice, it feels instant). Apparently introduced in 2017. I’ve had it on my home banking (app too) since then I think, but from my previous bank account they cost a whooping 7€, with my current bank the instant transfers are just as free as the normal ones so I use them all the time. I recently bought a used motorcycle within a morning thanks to this.
Wero itself is likely based on SEPA Instant Payments.
I was comparing them to the services used to send money to other people, but of course as you said the big thing we’re still missing is a unified point of sale payment network in all of the eurozone, maybe Wero will be the one, in that case I’ll be happy to use it, but IMHO we should have a standard public one based on SEPA Instant payments.
Wero is an added step on top, still much better than the competition, but they’re currently a convenient alternative to bank transfers (for people who didn’t discover the instant SEPA ones), and also as you noted unfortunately based on apps that run solely on American platforms. It’s mentioned on their wikipedia page too. I’ll keep an eye on them though, they could still work for me, we’ll see.