Wero, Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition and the stablecoin question – is the payments industry building the future or just adding more layers to the present?
Wero was one of the defining talking points at Merchant Payment Ecosystem (MPE) in Berlin last week. Payment Expert’s Callum Williams returns from the German capital with a fresh perspective on the pan-European A2A scheme, now backed by 16 banks and already live in Belgium, France and Germany.
Joining him are Payment Expert Editor Rachael Kennedy and News Editor Louis Thompsett to ask whether Wero can succeed where every previous attempt has failed.
The political wind is clearly behind it – but the European Alliance of Payment Schemes (EAPS), the Monnet Project and PayFair all failed.
What makes this attempt different? Does the decision to introduce chargebacks signal genuine ambition or a quiet concession that it can only win consumers by resembling the card networks it is trying to displace?
The European Central Bank (ECB) says it is glad Wero exists. It has also publicly doubted whether European payment schemes are genuinely interoperable. The team asks whether Wero’s long-term success is actually contingent on other schemes becoming obsolete, and if the EU has the appetite to effectively pick winners.
At MPE, Mastercard‘s Anne Marie Dentz called for collaboration over competition between traditional card rails and emerging A2A schemes like Wero.
Yet Mastercard had already completed its $1.8bn acquisition of BVNK, one of the world’s largest stablecoin payment processors with $30bn in annualised payment value.
What does it mean for a network to own the underlying stablecoin infrastructure layer? And what does that say about where Mastercard sees the future of payments heading?
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