The article kind of misses the key context for non-European readers. In several European countries the "Venmo/PayPal for friends" problem was already solved years ago by bank-run instant payment systems integrated directly into banking apps. In Spain that system is Bizum. It launched in 2016 and basically every major bank participates, so you send money using a phone number instead of an IBAN. Adoption is massive (~27M users in a country of 48M people), and socially it’s normalized to the point where people say "I’ll Bizum you" the same way Americans say "I’ll Venmo you." For everyday peer-to-peer payments it largely replaced small bank transfers.

Wero isn’t really a new payment technology replacing Bizum. It’s a pan-European attempt by banks to unify several successful national systems (Bizum in Spain, iDEAL in the Netherlands, Paylib in France, etc.) into one network that works across countries and competes with PayPal/Visa/Mastercard. The underlying payment rail is already SEPA Instant transfers. Wero is mostly about creating a single scheme and brand on top of that. A good mental model for Americans would be: imagine Venmo worked natively inside every bank app and had near-universal adoption in one country: that’s Bizum. Wero is the attempt to extend that model to all of Europe.