In the Netherlands, local online payments are done using iDEAL, a Dutch online payment system which works surprisingly well. When I pay online, I’m redirected to my bank’s website1 where I authorise the operation. My bank then sends the money directly to the merchant’s account.
iDEAL has a few notable advantages: it’s a purely local system (avoiding any foreign intermediaries or fees), payments flow directly through the banking system, and I don’t have to share sensitive card information with merchants. I instruct my bank to send money: I don’t give a merchant permission to extract it.
Sadly, iDEAL is being phased away by Wero. Wero is marketed as a “truly European” payment method, touted as an improvement. In reality, it is quite the opposite: it introduces strong dependency on Google and Apple, two foreign companies with terrible track records on user rights.
Wero supports only apps that run on Google’s and Android proprietary locked-down operating systems. It does not support using a regular browser on a regular computer. These facts are confirmed in their FAQ.
The choice is clear: to continue using online payments, one must use a mobile device entirely under the control of Google or Apple and agree to their contractual terms, or stop participating altogether. Wero is legally European, but in practice it locks users into foreign ecosystems.
What really drives me crazy is the shameless propaganda around the initiative. Wero is presented a European, independent, future-proof payment system. But it’s an American lock-in disguised as progress. The system relies entirely on foreign corporations subject to laws and rulings outside Europe — jurisdictions currently campaigning against European data sovereignty.
Some banks allow using their own application on some devices as well as the browser. ↩︎