EPI’s Wero goes live in France
The European Payments Initiative (EPI) is continuing to roll out its digital wallet and instant account-to-account payments solution Wero across the continent with a go-live among a number of banks in France.
EPI expands Wero solution to France
Groupe BPCE, Crédit Agricole and Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale became the country’s first financial institutions to deploy the service through their banking apps in September.
From this month, this list will also include BNP Paribas, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and Société Générale, which will follow a similar route of deployment initially. La Banque Postale will also join its peers in launching Wero but through a specific EPI-developed app.
The customers of these financial institutions will be able to use Wero to complete person-to-person (P2P) transactions using just a telephone number or email address.
The service will build on the success of Paylib, an online payment method which has amassed 35 million registered users in France since launching in 2013. However, the service is now set to be discontinued in “early 2025”.
In its place, the EPI says it plans to integrate new functionalities into Wero beyond the P2P use case, including a money request function and the ability to generate individual QR codes for payments from next year.
Other value-added services, including buy now, pay later options, shared spending capabilities and merchant loyalty programmes, are “also in the pipeline”.
Due to the EPI’s previous debut of Wero in Germany in July, customers of participating banks in France can now also use the service to send and receive cross-border payments with account holders in the neighbouring nation.
The EPI says the service will expand its coverage to Belgium before the end of the year, with Luxemburg and the Netherlands highlighted as next steps beyond this.
