Wero as an alternative to PayPal Revolut

It's called Wero. 16 European banks (BNP, ING, SocGen etc.) pooled together to build a pan-European payments network, an alternative to Venmo, Revolut and eventually Visa, MasterCard. Already 50M users in France, Belgium, Germany. Last month they signed an alliance with Bizum, Bancomat, MB WAY and Vipps. Overnight: 130 million users across 13 countries.

P2P cross-border this year. In-store and e-commerce by 2027.

The motivation is obviously geopolitical. Lagarde has been saying publicly that every card tap in Europe sends data to the US or China. With Trump and tariffs, this went from nice-to-have to actual priority.

My question is whether it actually scales. Network effects in payments are brutal — merchants won't adopt without consumers, consumers won't switch without merchants. That loop killed Giropay, Monnet, PayFair. What's different this time is they're connecting wallets people already use rather than building from zero.

Also, the Digital Euro keeps getting conflated with this. It's a completely different thing (CBDC, ECB-issued, not before 2029) and the banks are actively lobbying against it. Two separate conversations.