European payment system Wero comes to Lidl online stores

The European banking sector has long been looking for ways to How to reduce dependence on American financial and card giants, such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Google Pay. An important milestone on this path has now been set by discount retailer Lidl, which has become the first major grocer to integrate the new European digital payment system Wero into its German online store (lidl.de). In the future, they plan to expand this service to online stores in Belgium and France.

How does Wero work and why is it important for Europe?

Wero is an initiative of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), which brings together 18 major European banks and financial institutions and currently reaches over 57 million users across Europe. Wero enables direct "Account-to-Account" payments, meaning that money travels directly between bank accounts in just a few seconds, without the need for traditional card intermediaries.

When making an online purchase, the customer does not need to enter their payment card number or IBAN. They simply confirm the transaction within their mobile banking application or by scanning the QR code on the screen.

All financial data remains within the European banking environment, strengthening Europe's data sovereignty.

In addition to Lidl, the Wero system has already been adopted by companies such as Decathlon, CTS Eventim and A&O Hostels, and Rossmann, Hornbach, CEWE, Baur and the airline Air Europa are also planning to introduce it soon.

Have we just replaced our dependence on Visa and Mastercard with a dependence on Google and Apple?

Although Wero successfully addresses the issue of financial sovereignty by replacing US card networks, there is an obvious paradox in the technological implementation. The service still relies heavily on the US mobile operating systems Android (Google) and iOS (Apple).

The Wero system operates through mobile banking apps or the standalone Wero Wallet app, which are available on Google Play and the Apple App Store. Wero is not designed as a fully open, web-based interface or hardware-independent standard. It is a closed system and application that requires a smartphone running one of two dominant operating systems to operate.

Users of devices that are not supported by Google (Huawei phones, for example) and open source systems such as GrapheneOS often encounter a problem because the standalone Wero application or banking applications with integrated Wero use security mechanisms to check the integrity of the device (Google Play Integrity API). On devices without official Google services or with appropriate patches, these applications often refuse to work or require the use of the Google services sandbox.

One of the few ways to get Wero to work on open devices (like GrapheneOS) is to use a bank's banking app that includes Wero and doesn't strictly require official Google services. However, these are few and far between.

Wero is a great step towards European monetary and banking independence. However, as long as financial services remain dependent on applications that require the closed infrastructure of Silicon Valley tech giants, such solutions only shift Europe's dependence on American card giants to the operating system level. For full digital sovereignty, Europe should also promote open standards that do not require the approval or infrastructure of Google and Apple.