And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?
Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.
Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.
I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.
In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free.
It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.
The big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me!
And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.