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Europe wants to pay without depending on Visa or Mastercard, and Lidl has just taken a key step to achieve this: with Wero

July 27, 2026 by usatoday24

Lidl has started to accept werothe payment system promoted by banking in Europe, in its German online store. Even at first it may not tell us much, but a supermarket of the stature of Lidl that adds one more payment method is part of a much broader movement: an attempt by Europe to stop depending on Visa and Mastercard for something as everyday as online payments. We tell you all the details. Wero, “the European bizum”. According to the chain itself has confirmedLidl is the first large supermarket in Germany to integrate Wero into its online payments. Lidl.de customers who have an account in one of the 18 banks that already support the system will be able to pay directly from their current account, in real time, and without the card or any US payment network intervening in the operation. How it works in practice. The process is simple, since it is enough to activate the Wero function once in the bank’s app, similar to the way Bizum works in Spain. From there, when completing the purchase on Lidl.de, the customer can confirm the payment from their own bank (the website automatically redirects them to the app) or scan a QR code with their mobile phone. The money comes directly from the bank account, and in case of return, it returns the same way. There are no card intermediaries involved. Why Lidl and why now. According to collect According to The Paypers, the deployment begins in Germany, but Lidl and the European Payments Initiative (EPI), the entity that manages Wero, already plan to extend its adoption to online stores in Belgium and France throughout 2026, and also incorporate payment in physical stores before the end of the year. Nicola Bracht, head of Schwarz Payment Solutions (the payments division of the Schwarz group, parent of Lidl), explained to the media that the decision responds “to the search for a fluid customer experience” and “data protection and security criteria aligned with European standards”, and has announced that the group expects Wero to continue growing as a transversal payment method across different channels. A European alternative to Visa and Mastercard. wero born in 2023 as a trademark of the EPI, an initiative founded in 2020 by fifteen European banks (including BBVA, Santander, Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas) with the aim of building their own payment alternative that reduces dependence on Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, all of them of American origin. Its name plays on the words “we” (us) and “euro.” The system was first launched for transfers between individuals in Germany, France and Belgium, and has since expanded its scope, first to payments between individuals and companies, and now to electronic commerce. Between the lines. What makes Lidl’s incorporation relevant is not so much the gesture itself as what it represents, since Wero’s arrival in high-volume e-commerce is, precisely, the land where Visa and Mastercard get a good part of their business most profitable in Europe. Until now, Wero moved mainly in the field of transfers between individuals, something similar to what Bizum offers in Spain. That a chain with the scale of Lidl begins to accept it in its online store is a step towards that other field, that of commercial payments, where the dispute with the card networks is really played out. Lidl has not been the only one to announce a similar move. And Decathlon will also accept payments through Wero in Germany on its website, as has confirmed the chain. Economic sovereignty. This advance by Wero also comes at a time when the European payments ecosystem itself is reorganizing to another level. Bizum, together with the Italian Bancomat Pay, the Portuguese SIBS, the Polish Blik and the Nordic Vipps MobilePay, has promoted the creation of a joint company based in Madrid that seeks to make all these national systems interoperable under a common infrastructure with Wero. The president of the Spanish Banking Association, Alejandra Kindelán, counted A few months ago “when we talk about payments, we talk about economic sovereignty, competitiveness and Europe’s ability to decide its future”, and payments have gone from being a simple infrastructure to becoming a question of sovereignty. And now what. The calendar managed by EPI points to Wero reaching more online stores in France and Belgium throughout 2026, and payments in physical stores (via QR and NFC) before the end of the year. We will have to wait to know if with so much alliance and momentum from the banking sector, Wero can end up becoming a real alternative to Visa and Mastercard in Europe. Cover image | Jonas Leupe and VLADISLAV BOGUTSKI In Xataka | Mistral is very far in the AI race. Samsung doesn’t care about that and plans to invest a fortune in it

An economic science fiction text has sunk Visa and Mastercard in the stock market. The reason is more disturbing than the story itself

February 24, 2026 by usatoday24

Citrini Research, a hedge fund American published this week a text written as if it were a macroeconomic memorandum from June 2028. It is not a prediction, its authors warn. It is a speculative exercise. A feasible scenario. It has achieved 24 million impressions, and counting. It is not an anecdotal tweet. The markets they have responded by sinking. Visa has fallen 4.4%. Mastercard, 6.3%. American Express, almost 8%. And Capital One, 8%. This deserves an explanation. And it’s not what it seems. Between the lines. The market reaction is not explained by the specific content of the Citrini Research report, which includes arguments as debatable as that AI agents will abandon cards to pay with stablecoins in Solana. Antonio Ortiz, technology analysts, has pointed it out precisely: part of the argument “it is from the first of Twitter AI-hype“. The idea that an agent will compare twenty food delivery apps vibecodeadas to find the cheapest one smells like a caricature of the future. But the panic is not irrational. It is precisely the panic of not knowing where the limit is. Why is it importantand. What has moved the market has not been so much the thesis about payments but the thesis about the destruction of value. And that is solid: many billions of dollars of market capitalization have been built on a single foundation: that humans are slow, impatient, forgetful and loyal out of inertia. That we do not compare prices. That we renew subscriptions that we do not use. And that we pay commissions that we do not negotiate. An AI agent has none of those weaknesses. And that changes everything. The backdrop. Citrini’s report comes at a time when the so-called “saaspocalypse“is no longer a metaphor. WSJ states that investors are terrified by the possibility that AI ends up doing the work that large software companies bill for today. ServiceNow, Salesforce, business management platforms… all built on the premise that companies need software for their employees to do their jobs. But… what happens when employees disappear? What if the software itself can be replicated in weeks with agentic coding tools? Citrini’s fiction begins exactly there, in early 2026, when a competent developer can reproduce the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS in a few weeks, and constructs a scenario of systemic collapse. The big question. The report’s most disturbing argument is that in every previous technological cycle, job destruction created new jobs that only humans could do. This time, AI is already occupying those new positions as well. If that’s true—if AI improves faster than workers can reorient themselves—the self-correcting mechanism that has always kept creative destruction from turning into outright destruction wouldn’t work. That is the scenario that the markets have discounted this week, even if only partially and speculatively thanks to a creepypasta financial. Yes, but. The scenario requires assuming a speed of adoption that is not guaranteed, a completely absent political response and a total absence of new economic sectors. None of the three conditions are set in stone. Furthermore, as Antonio points out, there is some collective hysteria in the reaction: each announcement or “scary story catches attention and moves investors.” Markets are trading in panic over the unknown. But there’s an important difference between saying “this scenario won’t happen” and saying “this scenario is impossible.” And that difference is exactly what has the market nervous. The alarm signal. The most striking thing this week is that a speculative text, written in economic science fiction format, has been enough to move billions in market capitalization. That says a lot about the state of certainty in the markets regarding AI: it is practically non-existent. Nobody really knows how much a company whose moat It is human friction in a world where that friction is disappearing. The canary is still alive. But investors have stopped trusting the canary. In Xataka | AI promised to revolutionize all sectors. It has only revolutionized programming while the rest is still waiting Featured image | Avery Evans

European banks have already defined their plan to depend less on Visa and Mastercard

April 22, 2025 by usatoday24

Bizum It is a sensational tool for online payments in Spain, but it has a problem: it is not international. Or at least not much. International online payments in the European Union depend largely on two big names: Visa and Mastercard. There is no European system Made in Europe that allows the rapid shipping of money, but it is something that the European payments initiative (EPI) wants to solve. His proposal already has a name, Wero, and his plan is as follows. Context. The European Payment Initiative It was founded in 2020 by 16 banking entities such as BBVA, Santander, Deustche Bank, Grupo ING, Unicredit and BNP Paribas. Its objective is to create a payment system and a European interbank network or what is the same, a platform capable of competing against Visa, Mastercard or PayPal. These are of American origin, so the idea of EPI is to promote the independence and sovereignty of payments. For members “it is no longer a future project, but a need facing all European countries,” as they have exposed in a letter. The problem. That there are many local solutions, but none at European level made in Europe. For example, if we think of payments and money shipments between individuals in Spain and Andorra we have Bizum, but in Italy they have Bancomat, in Portugal they use MB Way, in Sweden it has Swish, in Switzerland they use twint and in other places, such as Germany and Austria, the use of PayPal It is widespread. The proposal of EPI with Wero is “to respond to this challenge through a unique payment solution, all in one, instantaneous and paneuropea, capable of covering over time all cases of payment use that consumers and professionals require.” A second, Wero? That is the name that this “European bizum” received in September 2023. It makes a certain sense: the word consists of “We” (us) and has similar pronunciation to “euro.” In addition, he approaches the word “Vero”, which is “truth” in Latin. He threw himself First in Germany Back in July last year, in France in September and in Belgium in November. Wero is integrated into the banks of the banks, so the experience is, for all purposes, nailed to Bizum’s. Image | Wero And what does it propose? According to exposes the EPI“A unique, safe and avant -garde paneurpea payment platform, with multipurparacities, which can work in all European markets for local and cross -border transactions.” That is, a kind of visa and bizum of Europe for Europe. Although it is not well known yet, Wero has the endorsement of the European Commission and 40 million registered users. In addition, it is already fully functional in both P2P and P2Pro transactions (individuals to companies). However, the reality is that the deployment is being slow. It is normal to be a project of these characteristics, however. For summer of 2025, the EPI plans to launch the payments in electronic commerce in Germany and Belgium to later do so in France and the Netherlands “laying the bases and test points for a viable European solution.” At the end of 2026, EPI intends to add the omnicanal payments, payments at the point of sale or in stores and invoices payments. The idea is to use QR codes and NFC technology. Bizum is international. The efforts are there and Wero is promising. However, and as far as Spain is concerned, it should be noted that Bizum has been international for just a few weeks. At the beginning of the month, Bizum confirmed that it was going to be integrated with Bancomat and MB Way, the payment solutions of Italy and Portugal, respectively. Banco Santander, Abanca and OpenBank already support international shipments. Caixabank, BBVA and Banco Sabadell will do it soon. Cover image | Wero

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