[gorbypark]

> But does this act like a debit account?

Yeah, it's a debit account. I'm in Spain and use Bizum frequently. It's just a "pay from your bank account" system.

You mostly type in your phone number, get a notification (or text, depends on the bank) and open up your banking app and approve the transaction.

You can send money person to person as well.

Many European countries have a similar system. Wero is "just" stitching the national systems together into a EU wide one.

Credit cards with rewards and points are pretty rare in Europe, and if they do exist, pale in comparison to what you can get in the US/Canada. It depends on how you look at it, but it's kinda good. The EU caps credit card transaction fees at 0.3% and debit transactions at 0.2% iirc, versus in the US/Canada where they are frequently 2-3%. In theory this cost is just passed onto the consumer, so paying an extra 2-3% to get 2-3% back in points or whatever.

[tialaramex]

The nasty element of that reward situation, and why I am deeply in favour of the European choice here, is that while some people get nice rewards, some people just pay much higher prices and don't get rewards. So this actually worsens the divide between rich and poor to an extent, and that's just bad policy.