giropay has been discontinued: what merchants need to know

giropay no longer exists. Its owner paydirekt announced the decision on 24 June 2024, acquirers were barred from migrating to the required new API from 1 July 2024, and the scheme was switched off completely on 31 December 2024. If giropay still appears in your checkout, in your payment method list or in your integration documentation, it is generating errors and confusion rather than revenue.

Closure

Why giropay was shut down

giropay never achieved the scale its owners needed. Launched under the paydirekt brand in 2015 and consolidated under the giropay name in 2021, it was intended as a German answer to PayPal and never reached the market share to justify continued investment. The decisive factor was strategic rather than technical: the German banking industry redirected its funding towards the European Payments Initiative and Wero, and chose to stop paying for a national scheme it was about to duplicate at European level.

What replaced giropay for German merchants

There is no single successor. German bank transfer volume has redistributed across cards, PayPal, Klarna, open banking providers and, increasingly, Wero, which went live for retail payments in Germany at the end of 2025. Girocard remains the dominant domestic card scheme but was built for the point of sale and does not carry a card number usable in an online checkout form, which is precisely the gap giropay existed to fill. That gap is now being closed by Wero rather than by a direct replacement.

Cleanup

What to do if giropay is still in your checkout

Remove it. A retired method left in a payment selector costs conversion twice over, once when a customer selects something that cannot complete and once in the trust lost when it fails. Check your checkout, your payment method landing pages, your order confirmation templates and your help content. If you used giropay-ID for identity verification alongside payment, that check has to be rebuilt through a separate identity provider, since it disappeared with the scheme.

Calendar

The sequence has dates, and they belong in one place

The section below calls this a pattern rather than an isolated case. Turn it into a calendar, because that is the form in which it becomes manageable.

giropay ended on 31 December 2024. iDEAL completes its migration into Wero by 31 December 2027. Payconiq has been folded into the Bancontact and Wero structure. Put those dates in one document alongside the markets they affect and the share of your revenue in each, and the sequence stops being three unrelated tickets raised by three different people at three different times.

Then the one action that pays for itself. When a method migrates, ask for the successor’s rate in writing before the switch rather than after it. Before the switch you have alternatives to point at and a date your provider needs you to meet. After it, the volume is already flowing and the conversation is a favour rather than a negotiation. Nobody negotiates a migration, which is exactly why a migration is where price drifts.

Which payment provider supports German bank transfers for merchants in Germany?

Every PSP serving Germany offers an alternative, so the question is not who supports what. It is what each option costs you and what it does to authorisation and conversion in a German checkout. Bank transfer, cards, wallets and buy now pay later carry very different economics, and a method mix assembled by replacing a dead scheme with whatever the provider suggested first is rarely the mix you would have chosen deliberately.

Repricing

Where the volume went, and what it now costs

giropay was a bank transfer. Whatever replaced it in your German checkout probably was not, and the repricing happened without anybody deciding anything.

Follow it through. Take 5 million euros of German revenue with 8 per cent formerly on giropay, so 400,000 euros. If that volume landed on cards, it moved from an illustrative 0.9 per cent bank transfer rate to an illustrative 1.5 per cent card rate. That is 2,400 euros a year, arriving through a scheme closure rather than through a negotiation, on a line nobody reviewed because nobody chose it. Use your own rates; the point is the mechanism rather than the numbers.

The same thing is going to happen again in the Netherlands, and the date is already published. So the report to build now is method mix by market, month by month, at a level of detail where you can watch one method fall and another rise. Build it before the next migration rather than after it, and the change becomes visible while you can still do something about it. That is the difference between managing a payment mix and inheriting one.

The wider pattern: national schemes are consolidating into Wero

giropay is not an isolated case. Payconiq in Belgium and Luxembourg has been folded into the Bancontact and Wero structure, and iDEAL in the Netherlands is being absorbed into Wero with the migration set to complete by 31 December 2027. If you sell across several European markets, you are not managing one scheme change but a sequence of them, each arriving with its own contract paperwork. Treating them as separate administrative tasks is how pricing drifts.

Reviewing your German payment mix

Losing a method is a reason to look at the whole selector rather than to patch one hole. What each remaining method costs you is set in your PSP contract, not by the schemes. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

A method that sends the customer off your site and back again puts the return path squarely in scope for checkout process optimisation.

Relevant markets: Germany