bunq, the Amsterdam-based neobank, said on 22 September 2026 that it had become the first bank to offer Wero for both person-to-person transfers and online purchases in all four of the wallet’s launch markets: the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium. bunq announced the rollout at its bunq Update 32 event in Amsterdam, where it also said user deposits had passed €10 billion and that it would offer credit limits of up to €5,000 on its credit card in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain.

Wero is the payment wallet built by the European Payments Initiative, the bank-backed consortium trying to give Europe a payment scheme that does not run on Visa or Mastercard. Most banks have added it country by country, following their own home market. bunq has done all four at once, and that says more about where Wero’s growth will come from than the “first” label does.

What bunq customers can do with Wero

According to bunq’s announcement, bunq personal and business customers in the four countries can send money to anyone in the participating markets using only a phone number. They can also pick Wero at checkout on participating merchant websites and pay straight from their bunq account without entering card details.

Wero runs on instant account-to-account payments, so money moves between bank accounts directly rather than through a card network. For consumers the experience looks much like any other mobile payment app. For merchants the pitch is lower cost, because the scheme cuts out intermediaries that take a share of each card payment.

Why a cross-border neobank suits Wero

Wero replaces a patchwork of national systems: iDEAL in the Netherlands, Giropay in Germany, Paylib in France and Payconiq in Belgium and Luxembourg. Each of those worked well at home and poorly across borders. A Dutch shopper could not use iDEAL on a French website, and a German couldn’t send money to a Belgian friend with Giropay.

Most of the wallet’s customers still come from large domestic banks, and their users mostly pay people in the same country. Cross-border use, which is supposed to be Wero’s main advantage over the old national schemes, gets little real-world testing that way.

bunq is different. It markets itself to people who live, work or travel across European borders, and holds a single European banking licence with customers spread across the continent. Fintechbits has covered its Belgian IBAN and Wero plans, part of the same effort to look local in each market while running one platform. A bunq customer in Amsterdam paying rent to a landlord in Antwerp is exactly the use case Wero was designed for and has so far struggled to show at scale.

Where Wero stands

EPI says Wero has been live for person-to-person payments in Belgium, France and Germany since 2024 and serves 59 million users. Martina Weimert, EPI’s chief executive, put the figure at “60 million users and counting” in bunq’s release. Online retail payments went live in Germany at the end of 2025, with France and Belgium following in stages through 2026.

The larger tests are still ahead. EPI plans to migrate at least 15 million consumers from Payconiq in Luxembourg by the end of 2026 and from iDEAL in the Netherlands by 2027, and to add point-of-sale payments in shops during 2026. iDEAL is the most important of these. It handles the large majority of Dutch online payments, and moving that volume onto Wero without losing merchants or shoppers would give EPI a dominant position in one market to build out from. EPI’s wallet site sets out the rollout plan.

Fintechbits looked at the infrastructure side of this in its report on ACI, EPI and European instant payments. EU regulation has already forced instant payment rails into place across the eurozone. The open question is whether a consumer brand built on those rails can win enough everyday use to matter.

What the €10 billion figure tells us

The deposit number is arguably the bigger bunq news. Passing €10 billion in user deposits gives weight to the company’s claim to be Europe’s second-largest neobank. The higher credit card limit fits the same pattern: bunq is moving from a spending and saving app towards a fuller bank, and lending is where it makes money from those deposits.

For EPI, a larger bunq helps at the margin. Every bank that enables the wallet across borders adds to the network effect. bunq’s customer base is still small next to the large German and French banks that back EPI, and its role is more demonstration than volume.

Our view

bunq’s announcement is a useful proof that Wero can work as a pan-European product rather than four national ones sharing a logo. It does not change the arithmetic of adoption, which depends on the big domestic banks and on merchants choosing it at checkout. Still, EPI needs visible examples of cross-border use, and bunq has handed it one.

The weakness remains the merchant side. Consumers can only pick Wero where merchants accept it, and outside Germany online acceptance is still building. bunq users in France or Belgium will find fewer places to use it than in Germany for some time.

What to watch

The next big date for Wero is the iDEAL migration in the Netherlands, scheduled for 2027. If Dutch shoppers and merchants move across with little friction, Wero will have a home market with near-universal online acceptance. Watch also for EPI’s first point-of-sale launch in shops, promised for 2026, which would be the wallet’s first direct challenge to cards at the till.