European Payments Initiative (EPI), a a European player committed to offering a sovereign payment alternative to all consumers in the region, today announced the launch of Wero.
The European instant account-to-account payment solution will be available to French customers of BNP Paribas, Groupe BPCE, Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, La Banque Postale and Société Générale, as well as many of their subsidiaries.
While most banks will initially offer Wero via their applications, La Banque Postale customers will be able to make payments using the Wero application, developed by EPI. It will be available in all smartphone application shops from the second half of October 2024. The first Wero brand campaign will be launched in France on October 14th.
The deployment calendar is as follows:
Banking groups members of EPI Wero deployment date
BNP Paribas Starting October 24th, 2024
Groupe BPCE From September 2nd to October 2nd, 2024
Crédit Agricole September 26th, 20241
Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale From September 25th to November 6th, 2024
Crédit Mutuel Arkéa January 2025
La Banque Postale October 28th, 2024
Société Générale Starting October 24th, 20242
The launch of the person-to-person (P2P) service will enable users with a French bank account to send and receive money simply and instantly, using just a telephone number or email address. Wero will take over from Paylib, whose 35 million registered users will be offered a simple switch to the European payment service before Paylib is discontinued in early 2025. The plan is to integrate new functionalities later, such as the “Money Request” function and the generation of individual QR codes so that users do not have to give their phone number when making a person-to-person payment.
Following the start of the solution in Germany in July 2024, users from both countries will now be able to make cross-border payments between the already rolled-out participating banks and their customers. In Belgium, all member banks will have deployed the solution by the end of the year. Luxemburg and the Netherlands will follow in a subsequent step.