Wero at the till: first terminal deployment in Belgium, broad POS launch in Germany not before 2027
On 16 September 2026 the European Payments Initiative announced the first in-store use of Wero, in Belgium: a QR code on a terminal from the payment service provider Payworld, paid straight from the bank account. For Germany, EPI puts broad availability at the point of sale no earlier than 2027 — with ten million registered users in the country by now.
What happened
On 16 September 2026 in Paris, the European Payments Initiative (EPI) announced that Wero is arriving at the shop till for the first time, in Belgium. The Belgian payment service provider Payworld is switching on acceptance: the customer scans a Wero QR code displayed on the Payworld terminal and pays straight from their bank account. The integration was shown at the EPI stand at NRF Europe 2026, which ran in Paris from 15 to 17 September. According to EPI, more than 48,000 merchants in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have now processed Wero transactions, both online and in store; Luxembourg is expected to grow from around 600 to over 2,000 acceptance points by the end of the month. For Germany the announcement is unambiguous: Wero currently runs here only in isolated physical environments — electric vehicle charging is named — and broad availability at the point of sale in Germany and France is planned in stages from 2027. Reach, meanwhile, is growing faster than acceptance: on 10 September 2026 S-Payment reported ten million registered users in Germany and 60 million in Europe.
Who it affects
In-store merchants in Germany not at all today — and that is precisely the news. It becomes relevant for everyone who signs a terminal or payment network operator contract with a 48- or 60-month term in the coming months, because those devices will still be standing at the till in 2027. Online merchants are already in scope: in Germany, customers pay with Wero at Decathlon, dm, Eventim and Lidl, among others.
What it means
There is still a lot of work between a QR code on a Belgian terminal and a genuine POS rollout, and EPI says so unusually openly. The contactless account-to-account payments shown in Paris explicitly ran in test environments and are, according to EPI, not commercial launches. What is real is one payment service provider in one country and a scanning procedure that costs seconds at the till. It is also notable that EPI names 2027 for Germany in the body text, while the boilerplate at the end of the same announcement continues to promise point-of-sale payments for 2026. Anyone planning should go by the body text.
Even so, no merchant should wave this away. Ten million German users is the order of magnitude at which a large chain operator starts doing the maths, and the key-points draft from the Federal Ministry of Finance requires at least one European scheme for the planned mandatory card acceptance — Wero is the obvious candidate. The economic appeal is obvious: an account-to-account payment involves neither interchange fee nor scheme fee. Only, neither announcement states a merchant fee, a rule on buyer protection, or a German payment network operator or acquirer who will switch it on. A scheme without published terms is not an offer, it is an announcement.
What to do now
- For every terminal or payment network operator contract you sign now, check the term against the year 2027 — and get it in writing whether and at what cost your payment network operator will later switch on Wero.
- Do not invest in new hardware on the grounds of Wero. As long as no German acquirer names a fee, there is nothing to calculate.
- If you sell online: Wero is available there and the test costs little. Measure conversion and cost against PayPal and direct debit before the in-store discussion begins.