Wero ING Deutschland has reached a milestone that could say a lot about Europe’s payment ambitions. After one year of real-world use, the numbers are starting to show whether Wero can move towards its promising role in European payments. Read on to see what the latest figures reveal and what they do not.
ING Deutschland marked one year of Wero on August 21, 2026, reporting that nearly 700,000 customers have adopted the payment service. Wero started inside ING’s German banking app with person-to-person transfers and has since expanded into online shopping.
At its very beginning, Wero was designed to give European consumers and businesses an alternative to payment services built around major international networks. It’s a payment app that allows account-to-account transactions between interoperable banking environments. Its advantage over typical bank transfers is that Wero runs on SEPA Instant, allowing for immediate payment settlement.
Wero is operated by the European Payments Initiative (EPI), a group of European banks and payment providers working to create a shared payment infrastructure across the continent. Unlike a traditional card payment, Wero can move money directly from a customer’s bank account to the recipient’s account. That makes it an example of account-to-account payments, where the bank account itself is used to make the transaction rather than a card sitting between the customer and merchant.
For ING Deutschland, the first year shows a clear expansion in use cases. After the first six months, more than 500,000 Wero wallets were activated by customers of ING Deutschland. In June, the bank said more than 600,000 customers had started testing Wero, equal to around 15% of its current-account holders. Wero was also introduced for e-commerce, allowing customers to pay participating online merchants directly from their current accounts.
The newer figure of nearly 700,000 therefore represents continued growth, but it also puts the scale of adoption into perspective. ING Deutschland serves more than 10 million customers, meaning the Wero figure represents less than 7% of its overall customer base. That comparison is not a direct measure of payment activity, since not all ING customers use current accounts, but it highlights the distance between activation and mass-market adoption.
Nevertheless, the wider European rollout gives ING Deutschland Wero users another important advantage. In the Netherlands, for instance, EPI and local banks are migrating the widely used iDEAL payment system to Wero, with the first phase already underway. Wero is expanding in Luxembourg too, while Belgium and France also part of its existing rollout. If consumers can use one European system across multiple markets, merchants have a stronger reason to support it and banks have a larger network to build around.
Still, EPI Wero adoption has to be judged by more than activation numbers. The harder test will be how frequently people use Wero, how widely merchants accept it and whether consumers begin choosing it instead of familiar card and wallet options. After one year, Wero has meaningful traction. But payment cards still reign in Europe. Whether that becomes a genuine Wero vs Visa Mastercard challenge will depend on what happens next.
