Goodbye Payconiq, hello Wero
Hugo Pinart and Yann Grutzmacher (Left to right) Montage: Paperjam
Splitting dinner, paying back a friend or scanning a QR code has become second nature. From September, Luxembourg will have a new app for it. Wero is replacing Payconiq, but its ambitions go much further: it wants to become the payment wallet Europeans use everywhere.
You are out for dinner with friends. One person pays, five phones come out and a few seconds later everyone has sent their share. In Luxembourg, that usually means Payconiq. But not for much longer. From 1 September 2026, Luxembourg will officially join Wero, a new European payment wallet. Payconiq will remain available during the transition, but only until 30 September. After that, the app many people in Luxembourg have become used to will disappear.
At first glance, Wero might look like a simple replacement. New name, new app, same QR code. But behind it is a much bigger idea. Wero wants to become something Europe has never really had: one payment solution that works across borders and can compete with global payment services such as PayPal.
But there are still questions that need answers: What is it exactly, how does it work and are we really ready to switch, while most of us still call it Digicash?
So, what is Wero?
Even the name is meant to sound European. Wero was chosen from 238 possible names and combines “we” with a pronunciation close to “euro”. It also resembles vero, meaning “true” in Italian. The basic idea is not revolutionary and that is probably a good thing. You connect your bank account to Wero. To send money to a friend, you can use their phone number or email address instead of asking them to send you their IBAN. The money then goes directly from your bank account to theirs. No topping up another wallet. No waiting until tomorrow. No awkward message saying, “Did you get the money?” (yet you will probably still send a message to make sure). Payments are based on instant bank transfers and normally arrive within seconds.
Payconiq already works in a very similar way. During the transition in Luxembourg, existing Payconiq QR codes will even continue to work with Wero, meaning you should still be able to scan the same code at your bakery, restaurant or local shop. So why bother changing anything? Because Payconiq’s biggest weakness has always been what happens once you leave Luxembourg.
The problem with European payments
Imagine a group of students travelling together. One is from Luxembourg, another from Belgium, someone else studies in Germany and another comes from Spain. Everyone uses euros. Everyone has a smartphone. Everyone has a bank account. And yet paying each other can still involve different apps depending on where they are from. Luxembourg has Payconiq. Spain has Bizum. The Netherlands has iDEAL. Other countries have their own systems. Then there is PayPal, Revolut and the usual bank transfers somewhere in between.
The euro area created a single currency, but somehow never created one everyday digital payment system around it. Wero wants to change that. It is already available for person-to-person payments in Belgium, France and Germany and has grown to around 56 million users. Luxembourg is joining next, while the Netherlands will gradually move its enormously popular iDEAL system onto Wero. Austria is also expected to follow.
The long-term idea is fairly simple: sending €20 to your friend in Germany should feel just as easy as sending €20 to the person sitting next to you in Luxembourg. For a generation that studies abroad, travels frequently and often has friends scattered across several countries, that probably makes more sense than maintaining a collection of national payment apps.
Your phone is already becoming your wallet
Wero is also arriving at the right time. Young Europeans are slowly moving away from cash. ECB research shows that cash use declined steadily between 2019 and 2024 among younger groups, particularly people aged 18 to 27, while online and other cashless payments became increasingly important.
That will hardly surprise anyone who has recently watched a group of students split a restaurant bill. Cards are stored on phones. Concert tickets are on phones. Boarding passes are on phones. Banking happens on phones. And when is the last time somebody asked someone for their IBAN?
Wero fits directly into that behaviour. You select a contact, enter the amount and send the money. But Wero does not want to stop with transfers between friends. The goal is to move into online shopping, payments to professionals, subscriptions and physical stores. Retail payments have already started in Germany, with France and Belgium following during 2026. Point of sale payments and additional wallet functions are also part of Wero’s expansion plans.
If that works, Wero could eventually move from being “the app I use to pay my friend back” to something much closer to a full wallet. An alternative to PayPal. That is when things become more interesting.
Is Wero basically Europe’s PayPal?
The comparison is tempting. Europe has spent years watching American companies dominate large parts of its digital economy. Search means Google. Smartphones mean Apple and Android. Social media means Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat. Payments are not very different. PayPal remains one of the best-known ways to send money or pay online, while Visa and Mastercard sit behind huge numbers of card transactions. Apple Pay and Google Pay have meanwhile made those cards even easier to use.
Wero is an attempt to build a European alternative. But it works differently from PayPal. With Wero, the money moves directly between bank accounts through instant payments. There is no separate Wero balance sitting between you and your bank. Apple Pay is different again. Apple Pay makes your existing card easier to use, but the card network behind it is generally still there. Wero wants the bank account itself to become the payment method.
That might sound like a fairly technical distinction. For someone paying €7 for lunch, it probably is. The more interesting question is why European banks suddenly care so much.
Europe wants its own way to pay
The uncomfortable answer is that Europe is heavily dependent on companies from elsewhere to move its money. The European Central Bank says that more than two thirds of card-based transactions in the euro area are processed under the rules of non-European companies. Thirteen euro area countries have no domestic option for in store payments and depend on international card schemes or mobile solutions.
In other words, Europe can manufacture cars, planes and luxury goods, but when you tap your card to buy a coffee, there is a good chance an American payment network is involved. For years, that was mostly treated as a business issue. Today, it is increasingly also becoming a political one.
Europe is talking much more about digital independence, whether that concerns cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, social media or payments. Wero fits neatly into that discussion. The European Payments Initiative, the group behind Wero, is backed by major European banks and payment providers. It also says Wero’s data is stored in European data centres.
For the average 20-year-old, “European payment sovereignty” is probably not a strong enough reason to download another app. Being able to instantly pay a friend in Paris might be. And that is Wero’s real challenge: turning a political and banking project into something people want to use.
But will people switch?
This might be the hardest part. A payment app is only useful when the people around you use it too. Think back to WhatsApp. It does not necessarily dominate because every feature is better than every competing messaging app. It dominates because everyone you want to message is already there. Payments work in much the same way.
If your friends use PayPal, you use PayPal. If every shop accepts Visa, you carry a Visa. If everyone in Luxembourg uses Payconiq, asking someone to “Payconiq me” becomes normal language. Wero has to build that same habit. And despite already having tens of millions of registered users, that has not happened everywhere yet.
A German survey published in August found that only 39% of adults could correctly identify Wero as a payment service. Almost a third had never heard of it, and even among people who knew Wero, many had never used it. That shows the difference between having access to a payment service and actually caring about it.
Nobody wakes up thinking they need greater competition in European payment infrastructure. They just want paying to be easy. For Wero to work, it therefore has to be faster, more convenient or more widely useful than what people already have. The good news is that Luxembourg gives it a shortcut. Wero is not entering a market where it needs to explain mobile payments from scratch. Payconiq has already done that. People already know how to scan a QR code or send money using their phone.
Instead, Wero is taking an existing habit and trying to make it European.
Wero does not need to be exciting
The funny thing about payment systems is that the best ones are almost invisible. Nobody wants to spend ten minutes thinking about how to pay €4.80 for a coffee. You tap. You scan. You send. Done. That is why Wero’s biggest achievement would probably be becoming boring.
Imagine going on a weekend to Brussels and paying your friend back without asking which app they use. Ordering something from a German website and clicking Wero instead of entering card details. Or splitting the Airbnb after a trip and having everyone settle their part in seconds, despite living in different European countries.
That is the promise. For young Europeans especially, borders are becoming less relevant to the way they study, travel, work and socialise. Their payments have not always kept up. Wero now wants to fix that. Whether Europe really needs another wallet is debatable. But if Wero succeeds, we might eventually stop thinking of it as another wallet at all.
It will simply be how we pay.
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