For most of Europe's modern history, paying by card has meant paying over a network run from outside the EU. Wero and the European Payments Initiative (EPI) are a deliberate attempt to change that — to give Europe a home-grown, account-to-account payment scheme that works across borders and reduces the continent's dependence on global card giants. For businesses, it signals a shift in how Europeans may increasingly pay, and where money moves.
This article explains what the EPI and Wero are, how they work on SEPA Instant rails, the sovereignty motivation behind them, where the rollout stands, and what it all means for businesses.
What is the European Payments Initiative?
The European Payments Initiative is a venture backed by a group of major European banks and payment providers. Its goal is straightforward but ambitious: create a unified, pan-European payment solution that any business or consumer can use, rather than the fragmented mix of national schemes and foreign card networks that exists today.
The motivation is partly structural. Many euro-area countries have no domestic card scheme of their own — by the EPI's framing, a large share of euro countries lack a national payment scheme and rely entirely on international networks for card payments. That leaves a sizeable part of Europe's everyday payments dependent on infrastructure it does not control. The EPI aims to fill that gap with a single European scheme.
Meet Wero, the European wallet
Wero is the consumer-facing product of the EPI: a digital wallet that lets people send and receive money, and increasingly pay merchants, directly from their bank accounts. It is being rolled out by participating banks across founding markets and expanding from there.
The phased ambition is roughly:
- Person-to-person payments first — sending money to friends, family or anyone with the wallet, instantly.
- Online and e-commerce payments — paying merchants at checkout directly from your account.
- In-store payments over time, extending the wallet to the point of sale.
For users, the experience is meant to feel as simple as a messaging app: pick a recipient or pay a merchant, confirm, done — with the money moving straight between accounts.
What makes Wero notable is the backing behind it. Rather than a startup trying to win adoption from scratch, it is being distributed through banks that already have millions of customers, with the wallet built directly into the banking apps people use every day. That distribution is the EPI's biggest advantage — and the thing that gives a new European scheme a realistic path to scale against entrenched card networks.
How Wero works: account-to-account on instant rails
The defining technical choice is that Wero is account-to-account (A2A), not card-based. Instead of routing a payment through a card network, the money moves directly from the payer's bank account to the recipient's, settling over SEPA Instant rails. If you want the mechanics of those rails, our explainer on SEPA Instant and real-time euro payments covers the under-ten-second, always-on settlement that makes this possible.
Because it rides on instant euro infrastructure, Wero payments can be real-time and around the clock, and they bypass the traditional card-acceptance chain entirely. That A2A design is exactly what makes it a structural alternative to card networks rather than just another wallet sitting on top of them.
The core idea is to move euros directly between bank accounts, instantly, under a single European brand — cutting out the foreign card rails that most European payments rely on today.
The sovereignty motivation
It is hard to overstate how much payment sovereignty drives this project. When a critical share of a continent's payments depends on a handful of non-European networks, that is both a strategic and a resilience concern. Decisions about pricing, access and rules sit elsewhere, and a disruption to those networks would ripple across the European economy.
The EPI's answer is to build European-owned rails and a European brand so that, over time, a large slice of everyday payments can run on infrastructure governed within the EU. This sits alongside the public-sector effort to achieve the same goal — the ECB's digital euro — and together the two represent Europe building both a private and a public path to payment independence. They are complementary: one is central bank money, the other a bank-led commercial scheme, both aiming to keep euro payments in European hands.
Where the rollout stands
Wero has launched in its founding markets, beginning with person-to-person transfers and expanding feature by feature and country by country. The realistic picture is one of gradual, phased adoption: P2P is live and growing, e-commerce acceptance is being built out, and in-store use is further ahead on the roadmap. Coverage and available features differ by country and by participating bank, so the experience today varies depending on where you are and who you bank with. The trajectory, however, is consistent — broaden the wallet from sending money between people toward a full payment method merchants can accept.
What it means for businesses
Even at this stage, the direction has practical implications worth tracking.
- A new way to get paid. As Wero expands into e-commerce and in-store, it becomes an additional checkout option — one that settles account-to-account rather than over a card network.
- Potential acceptance economics. A2A schemes can change the cost structure of accepting payments by removing parts of the card chain. The real-world impact depends on how the scheme prices acceptance as it matures.
- Faster settlement. Because it runs on instant rails, funds can reach you in real time, which helps cash flow compared with slower settlement cycles.
- Cards remain essential. Wero is growing but early; card payments remain dominant across Europe and globally. For most businesses, robust card tooling is still the backbone of how they pay and get paid.
The smart stance is to watch Wero's expansion in your own markets — particularly which banks have enabled it and whether e-commerce acceptance has arrived — while keeping your existing payment operations solid. Schemes like this win adoption gradually, market by market, and the businesses best placed to benefit are the ones already comfortable working on modern euro rails when the new option reaches critical mass.
That last point matters for how you operate now. While account-to-account schemes mature, the practical day-to-day still runs on cards — which is exactly where 2card fits. Our virtual Visa cards for ad accounts, like all our products, sit on a single EU IBAN with SEPA, with accounts and Visa issuing provided by myTU, an EU-licensed EMI supervised by the Bank of Lithuania. You get European-regulated, instant-fundable card infrastructure today, while Europe builds the sovereign A2A rails of tomorrow.