Payment service: Pay in real time: Ing introduces PayPal competitor Wero

The still young European PayPal competitor Wero receives further support: Europe’s largest direct bank Ing wants to offer the payment service to its ten million customers in Germany in August. “We will live in Wero in August,” announced Ing Germany boss Lars Stoy in an interview with the German Press Agency in Frankfurt. “We are one of the first German banks to integrate it into your own banking app. This is also a feature, which is important to the ING group in total.”

Money transfer within seconds

In contrast to a conventional transfer, if you use Wero, you do not need the recipient’s account number, but can send money to a cell phone number or email address in real time. The European Payments Initiative (EPI), an association of European banks and payment service providers, plans to build a European payment alternative to the US competition from PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Co.

Epi has been with Wero since the beginning of July 2024. This offer was initially able to pay for mobile phone to mobile phone in this country only the customers of savings banks as well as folk and Raiffeisen banks via the apps of their respective institutes. In the meantime there is an independent Wero app that has been available at Postbank, for example, since the end of November.

“Reduce dependence on other payment methods”

In addition to Germany, Wero is already available in France and Belgium, and talks are currently underway for Austria. According to the latest information, EPI has a total of 42.5 million registered users in the recent information. For comparison: According to PayPal, PayPal has 35 million active customer accounts in Germany alone.

“As a European, we do well to work on our own payment systems in order to become self-sufficient and reduce the dependency on other payment methods,” said Ing Germany boss Stoy. “As an ING group with around 40 million customers, we will focus on everything in Europe that Wero will be a success.”