THE STUDIO REPORT - EP 14

Hello, dear Sippers, Payments geeks, and Everything in between! 👋

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of The Studio Report by Spill the Tea on Payment.

This edition asks one question: is Centrality in payments a strategy or a survival instinct? Does the Industry know the difference?

Payment Centrality, conservative reflex?

In this month’s memo:

Click on pay in the embedded player hereunder to listen it

Scroll down for the rest of the newsletter👇

Wero's real problem is not adoption figures or merchant services. It was built on a centralised logic in a continent that has structurally refused centralisation for seventy years.

I spoke in a recent post about how Wero helped the current debate with their big boots. It fuels an intense campaign, amplified by the constant noise of social networks, industry commentators, trade shows, speaking slots, and paid media.

But this stringent promotion shows a structural limit:

The current state of the European Union, as well as the dynamics between leaders in member states, might play against Wero

European Union, this supranational thingummy nobody agrees on

I am not going to surprise you, the European Union is not a federal country; it is more a supranational “thingummy” (and I assume this word, seeing the current chaos on the payments market), and to make it spicier, we have a central bank that issues a currency that not all member states use.

Each member state and its economic agents still fight for their share of Sovereignty. They refuse to cede one to another. Eventually, all member states will favour their champions and their interest

(Seeing the discussion with the funding of Ukraine currently, blocked by two states that want to pay a lower rate for gas, including one in an electoral campaign promising the moon to be reelected)

EPI as a vestige of the Franco-German couple

EPI (the mother company of Wero) and the Monnet Initiative have been a tentative from the Franco-German couple to create an ultra-centralised European digital version of what they have done already in France or Germany with Carte Bancaire or Girocard.

Even some employees of EPI come from Cartes Bancaire

But in 2026, the so-called « Franco-German couple » looks more like the War of the Roses than the eternal loves. It would be worth a 230-episode TV novela with the scheming Italian ragazza (the current love affair between Meloni and Merz )

The Revenge of « PIGS »: Meloni’s strong position and the EuroPA initiative

Meloni is a strong eurosceptic in disguise; she took repeated stances in favour of cash and will certainly not accept an initiative led by the French and German, after those two countries spat in Italy’s face during the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, or the COVID crisis.

It is not a surprise that EuroPA funding members are companies from countries in Southern Europe, who have been heavily criticised by Germany (particularly for their propensity to laziness and excessive debts, the infamous term “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain)

Today, Meloni’s love story with Fredriech Merz isn't about European unity; it’s a pragmatic axis that cares far more about national industrial excellence than a Parisian-led payment dream. France is completely stuck in an institutional crisis, with a president not far from the exit.

Friedrich Merz, by investing on Roma-Berlin axis, show the Northern/Southern debt-era hierarchy is dead. Merz sees Rome as more reliable than a crisis-stricken Paris. If Merz aligns with Meloni's pragmatism, Wero's "ultra-centralised" vision loses its biggest sponsor.

France lost its superb arrogance and capacity to address the crisis, even if the diagnosis was true:  Europeans need their strategic autonomy from Americans.

So, Wero as a global pan european standard pushed by member states? Not in a million years

Wero how to make new with old

To go further, Wero can announce X million users. What is the number of real users gained aside from the 35M of legacy users from Paylib, the coming millions of users of iDeal?

Current figures show a smaller adoption rate in Germany than in France, and the recent announcement of the memorandum, with EuroPA, cannot be more blurry (I talked about in my previous edition)

It is mostly Germans and French who aggressively drive the transition to Wero, not other nations, for different reasons :

Are bankers finally sexier than fintech?

Another interesting paradox we are seeing unfolding in Europe currently, with the Wero’s narrative :

Bankers have once been accused of being slow-moving dinosaurs who sacrificed all the crown jewels (the historical national processors) to private equity. They are now the defenders of European Payments against non-banking Acquirers and PayTechs who are accused to work for Americans.

This big promotional effort on Wero can be seen as a revenge from them, because even the sexy fintechs come to be members of Wero (the Revolut of this world)

Of course, it is easy to predict that Visa and Mastercard will lose ground because European industry leaders now understand their kryptonic relationship, but Wero as a global response?

No, it is a relationship of interest and a pragmatic approach to Payments. Take Adyen who decided to become a Carte Bancaire member, after years and years of being only a processor of it. They have enough volumes to economically justify this, but is this a strategic move towards European Sovereignty? Hard to tell.

To deep further into this theme of centrality, it is interesting to think also about the obsession of the International Payment Schemes to stay central.

This month, I published an essay to think about this question that is capital in a world where we hear more and more the term « decentralised »

Schemes have always been in a central position within the payments value chain; they regulate, authorise, and decide who does what.

This essay came after I read the prediction of one of them for 2026. I could not help to see that every prediction, every announcement is around that central position. Schemes do everything they can to keep this central place; one of my core assumptions is that it is about their survival.

When is the best moment to talk about their centrality? The checkout; it is where the big magic crystallises.

But in a world where business is more and more fluid, where the multiplication of the points of contact and frictions tends to erase the checkout, how can you maintain this central position?

Card schemes say now checkout should be « invisible », « tokenised », but they never talk about erasing it, as it would mean they erase themselves.

My analysis goes further by stating that it is actually deeply cultural if we compare it with how the Chinese envision payments.

In China, we want to make the checkout process dilute within the context, Schemes tries to keep it alive by making it invisible..

Banks conquered P2P by staying central. Merchant services could punish them for the same instinct.

My publication on Merchant Services generated quite a large share of impressions. I came to this conclusion after reflecting on the current developments at Wero.

Behind this post is the idea that a P2P payments provider will face difficulties when launching merchant services. Two different jobs.

And of course, I thought a lot about EPI while writing this post, for those who did not catch it.

The big difficulties for Wero come now. Conquering the P2P payments market was an easy job using the full capacity of bankers, but Merchant Services are a different games. Banks have historically been not really good at this, they used those services as a foot in the door to sell other services. Of course, Adyen and other PayTech showed same that Payments deserves more than being the side product.

But did the bankers learn their lesson, and will offer a real solution tailor made for merchants and their providers?

Next month, I will try to wrap up the document i promise in the previous edition, but those case studies take time and reflection. Reflection, research cannot be outsourced to an AI to magically prepare you a content.

You still can drop a line on [email protected]. I will read it with interest.

See you next month!