Europe Is Ditching Visa And Mastercard, And It’s a Huge Step
Year one in numbers
Wero is Europe’s payment answer.
A year ago, Wero showed up in my banking app. A new button for sending money instantly across Europe.
But it’s much more than that.
13 countries on paper. 130 million users in theory. The whole continent building its own payment rails.
Numbers
48.5 million registered users in the first 12 months. Germany, France, Belgium. Over €7.5 billion processed.
For a platform that only went live in mid-2025. Pretty solid.
For comparison: iDEAL, the Dutch system that’s getting fully migrated into Wero next year, took about five years to hit equivalent penetration in a single country. Wero did it across three.
Then this year, Revolut joined. That adds roughly 40 million European customers across every EU country where Revolut operates.
E-commerce is live in Germany and France. The Netherlands joins in 2026 with the full iDEAL migration. Luxembourg is next in the rollout queue. Point-of-sale payments (the moment you tap your phone at a shop terminal instead of routing through Visa or Mastercard) start rolling out from 2027.
The Gap
Mastercard alone has over 900 million cards in circulation across the EU.
Wero has 48.5 million users.
German adoption, despite Germany being the very first launch market, sits at roughly 5% of total transaction volume.
Visa and Mastercard together still process about 61% of all Eurozone card transactions. Globally, they move around $24 trillion a year between them.
13 EU member states have no domestic payment alternative at all. Every card swipe routes through American-owned infrastructure.
Wero is not closing that gap in two years. Probably not in five.
Leverage
Wero doesn’t need 50% market share to change the dynamics. It needs to reach the point where it exists as a credible operational alternative. A point where European regulators, banks, and governments can look at Visa and Mastercard and think: we have another option that works. With European infrastructure.
Not total volume. Capability across every payment type.
Cross-border peer-to-peer between European countries is live this year.
E-commerce online is live in Germany and France. Others will follow.
Point-of-sale at physical terminals will come in 2027.
Interoperability with Spain’s Bizum, Italy’s Bancomat, Portugal’s MB Way, the Nordic MobilePay is coming in the first half of 2026 or is being built to do.
Once all that’s running, Visa and Mastercard can no longer set the price by default.
That’s the point.
Fees
Visa and Mastercard charge merchants between 1% and 3% per transaction. Sometimes considerably more on cross-border.
Wero’s fee structure sits around 0.7%.
For a European retailer processing millions of euros in card payments a year, that’s tens of thousands flowing to the bottom line instead of out of the continent.
Luca Rosignan at Capgemini’s research institute put it well to Cybernews: even partial success at capturing domestic European transactions could effectively cap what global card networks can charge here going forward.
Wero needs to exist at sufficient scale to permanently cap what Visa and Mastercard can charge European merchants.
And that seems to be working.
Backing
The European Parliament voted in February to formally back the digital euro, explicitly framing it as essential for monetary sovereignty. ECB president Christine Lagarde has been pushing for European payment infrastructure for a while now. The ECB’s own committee chair publicly warned that Washington can switch off Europe’s entire payment system at any moment, because nearly all of it routes through American networks.
Thirteen countries signed the Europa Alliance. 16 major European banks back Wero directly with capital and customer bases.
This is part of a broader pattern I wrote about earlier this year. Europe is decoupling across multiple tech layers at once. Payments are just the slowest layer to move.
So Wero is a state-backed, ECB-endorsed infrastructure project with legislative support and a geopolitical motivation that didn’t really exist three years ago.
A huge step.
Next steps
The central interoperability hub launches in the first half of 2026. That single technical connection creates a unified network across 130 million users in 13 countries, who can pay each other and pay merchants without a single transaction touching Visa or Mastercard.
E-commerce expands beyond Germany and France into Belgium and the Netherlands. Point-of-sale pilots begin in late 2026. Continental rollout through 2027.
iDEAL, which currently handles the vast majority of Dutch online payments, migrates onto Wero next year. That brings an entire country’s payment habit into the European sovereignty system basically overnight.
With that, Wero might hit 60 million users by the end of 2026. Probably over €15 billion in volume. Roughly double the first year.
Downsides
Adoption is still slow where it should be fastest. 5% of transaction volume in Germany after a full year is not great. Habit is hard. Apple Pay and Google Pay have the ease of use on their side.
The user experience for Wero is fine, but not exciting. There’s no Wero feature that makes you want to switch. It’s a payment system. It works. But it’s not “sexy”.
Cross-border parts are still being wired up. Right now, paying a friend in Italy with Wero from Germany is technically possible but still feels like a beta product. (For me anyway.)
And the political backing is conditional. A shift in the ECB, a new German government, and the urgency could fade.
The Bottom Line
The goal for Wero was never to capture the whole market.
The goal is to make sure that the next time Washington reminds Europe it can flip a switch on the payment rails, Europe can look at the switch and say: go ahead. We’ll have our own.
We’re still a long way from that being fully true. But at least it’s in the making.