Accepting Wero as a merchant

Wero is the European account-to-account payment scheme operated by EPI Company, built on SEPA Instant Credit Transfer. It has carried payments between consumers in Belgium, France and Germany since 2024, it has been live for retail payments in Germany since the end of 2025, and it is rolling out through France and Belgium across 2026. In the Netherlands it arrives as the successor to iDEAL, on a timetable EPI restated on 15 July 2026. For a merchant the checkout barely changes. What changes is the shape of the price, the route a dispute takes to reach you, and the moment your PSP contract opens. The Dutch migration timetable is set out on the iDEAL page. This page is about accepting Wero itself.

How to accept Wero as a merchant

You do not contract with Wero. You contract with your PSP, which connects to the scheme on your behalf and translates the scheme rules into the terms and the pricing that reach your statement. If you already accept iDEAL, Bancontact or Payconiq, Wero usually arrives through the integration you have rather than a new one, because your provider handles the rail behind an unchanged checkout.

That convenience is the risk. A method that needs no development work also needs no conversation, and commercial terms that move without a conversation tend to move one way. Acceptance is a configuration. The rate is a negotiation, and the two arrive on the same day.

Rails

Wero runs on instant credit transfers, not on a card rail

Wero is built on SEPA Instant Credit Transfer. The customer pays directly from their own bank account, with their explicit consent, given inside their own banking app. Strong customer authentication therefore happens on the issuing side, in an environment the customer already has installed and already trusts.

The consequences run through your whole cost model. There is no interchange, because no issuer is being compensated for extending credit. There is no schedule of scheme fees moving several times a year. There is no acquirer markup sitting on an interchange base, because there is no interchange base for it to sit on. What reaches your invoice is a scheme cost and a provider margin, which is simpler to read and far easier to compare than a card rate, and it removes most of the places where a card contract hides value.

It removes your levers as well. There are no exemptions to tune, no transaction risk analysis threshold to manage, and no retry logic that recovers a soft decline. Authorisation rate on this rail is set by bank coverage and app availability rather than by your risk engine, so the work moves from risk engineering to checkout design and to which method sits first.

Where Wero is live, and what it does in each market

Wero is a wallet and a scheme at the same time, and which of the two your customer meets depends on the country. EPI states that Wero has been live for consumer payments in Belgium, France and Germany since 2024, and live for retail payments in Germany since the end of 2025, with progressive rollout in France and Belgium throughout 2026. Point-of-sale payments and value-added services including recurring payments and subscription management sit on the same roadmap, and the first subscription billing use case went live in France in September 2026. For Luxembourg, EPI has stated that the Payconiq payment platform ends on 30 September 2026, with existing QR codes usable until the end of that year. In the Netherlands, e-commerce runs today under the iDEAL | Wero brand while transactions move progressively onto Wero infrastructure.

The number that decides your coverage is in none of the announcements. Wero user counts are wallet counts, and a bank that offers Wero for sending money to a friend does not necessarily offer it at checkout. Several of the banks added through 2026 did one and not the other: N26 added Wero in Germany and France in August 2026 for transfers between people, not for online purchases. Ask your provider which issuers are live for e-commerce in a market before you count Wero as reach there.

Pricing

A percentage with a cap does not behave like a flat fee

Wero publishes no merchant rate. What it publishes is the shape. In its own words, pricing is a small percentage fee with built-in caps, so that a merchant stays in control of costs whether the transaction is 5 euro or 5,000. That single sentence is the most commercially significant thing the scheme has said, because a percentage and a fixed amount fail in opposite directions.

The shape is already visible in published provider pricing. Mollie lists Wero at 0.32 euro for domestic Dutch transactions, 0.39 euro for domestic Belgian transactions, and 0.90 per cent plus 0.25 euro for all other countries, checked on 9 September 2026. A merchant selling across Europe is therefore already paying ad valorem on part of its Wero volume today, while the domestic Dutch rate is still a fixed amount. EPI has committed that Wero scheme pricing remains broadly aligned with the current iDEAL | Wero level until 31 December 2028. No percentage has been published for the Dutch domestic rate after that date, and neither the level nor the form of the promised cap has been published at all.

What a percentage with a cap produces is a cost curve with a knee in it. Below the cap, cost rises with basket value. Above it, cost is flat and the effective rate falls with every euro you add. Two things follow. Your average order value tells you almost nothing: a merchant whose 100 euro average is made of 30 euro and 400 euro orders pays a different amount from one whose orders cluster at 100, on identical volume and an identical tariff. And once a cap exists, the cap rather than the percentage is the number to argue hardest, because it sets the ceiling on your largest transactions.

The work to do now is arithmetic rather than forecasting. Take last year's iDEAL | Wero and Wero transactions, band them by order value, and price each band under a fixed amount and under a percentage with a cap. That produces a curve rather than a number, and a curve is what you take into the conversation. On a million transactions at a 100 euro average order value, a tenth of a percentage point is 100,000 euro a year, straight to EBITDA, argued once instead of paid every month.

Routing

Some of your Dutch transactions already run over Wero

The migration in the Netherlands is not a date on which everything moves at once. It is a routing decision taken per transaction. When a payment starts, the provider checks whether the Rail Selection Method is available, and where it is, the transaction settles over the Wero rail while your customer sees an unchanged iDEAL | Wero flow and you receive an unchanged status back. PAY. published on 20 July 2026 that it would begin phasing traffic across from 14 September 2026, starting with a small share, that the payment flow stays identical both technically in your checkout and in the response, and that such transactions register in its statistics as Wero payments under their own Wero rate ID.

That makes this month checkable rather than theoretical. Ask your provider for the split of your Dutch volume by rail, and for the rate applied to each. Where a separate Wero rate ID exists, it can be repriced without anyone touching the line in your contract that says iDEAL, and the rate currently sitting on it may be an incentive rather than a price. PAY. describes its own in exactly those terms. An incentive is temporary by construction, and the difference surfaces in the first invoice after it lapses rather than in a negotiation.

Contract

The price commitment to 2028 is not a commitment to you

EPI has committed that Wero scheme pricing remains broadly aligned with the current iDEAL | Wero pricing level until 31 December 2028. Read the scope of that. It is a scheme commitment, given to payment service providers, about the cost of the scheme. You do not contract with the scheme. What reaches your invoice is that scheme cost plus your provider's margin, and nothing in the commitment holds the margin still.

For a buyer that is an opening rather than a reassurance. An increase quoted between now and the end of 2028 is a provider decision rather than a scheme one, and it can be put in exactly those terms: which part of this rate is scheme cost, which part is margin, and how does that sit against a published commitment. A question that can be tested against a public statement is rare in this market.

What belongs in writing while the contract is open is short and concrete. The Wero rate against your current iDEAL | Wero rate, per market, in the form in which it is charged. What happens on 1 January 2029, or at minimum the notice period and the right to leave at that point. The price of a dispute and who carries it. And what happens to the agreed rate if volume shifts between methods during the transition, because it will.

Purchase protection turns a final payment into a disputable one

An iDEAL payment cannot be pulled back. It is a credit transfer the payer initiates, there is no issuer to instruct and no chargeback right to invoke, and that finality is part of why the method has been cheap to run. Wero changes it. Dutch banks and payment service providers will collectively introduce Purchase Protection, with the objective of achieving full coverage by 1 January 2028.

It is not a card chargeback and should not be modelled as one. The customer is directed to the merchant first and escalates through their banking app only if that route produces nothing. But a dispute process that did not exist has to land somewhere, and it lands in the terms between you and your provider and in the process behind them. Who assesses, what evidence counts, within what deadline, what a case costs and who carries that cost. Then staffing, because a dispute arriving through a bank comes with a response time attached. The bill lands on two budgets that rarely speak to each other, the PSP invoice and customer service, and only one of them appears in the contract you are about to sign.

If your risk model assumes a Dutch account-to-account payment cannot be reversed, that assumption now has a date on it.

Which payment providers support Wero

Adyen, Buckaroo, CM.com, Mollie, Online Payment Platform, PAY.nl, MultiSafepay and PPRO agreed the next phase of the Dutch migration jointly with EPI and the Dutch banks, and a wider set of acquirers again documents Wero acceptance in the German and Belgian markets. Support is therefore not a selection criterion and should not be treated as one.

What separates providers is what each charges per Wero transaction, in what form, per market, and whether the number quoted today is a rate or an incentive. Only a minority publish anything at all, and where they do, the domestic and the cross-border numbers are already different products. Two merchants with comparable volume can pay materially different amounts for identical transactions, and neither finds out until the line is isolated and benchmarked against the market.

Reviewing what Wero will cost you

What you pay to accept Wero is set in your PSP contract and is negotiable in the same way every other line is. The sequence that works is to establish your position before the rate is rewritten rather than after: band your transactions by order value, isolate what you pay per rail today, and fix the form of the price in writing and not only the level. Start by working out whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs.

Relevant markets: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg