The world of payments. Every country pays its own way.

🇪🇺 Europe's domestic schemes and the Wero bet

Europe does not have one payment system: it has dozens. In the 1970s and 1980s, each country built its own national card scheme (CB in France, girocard in Germany, Bancontact in Belgium, Dankort in Denmark, PagoBancomat in Italy). Then, in the 2010s, each built its own mobile account-to-account app (Swish, MobilePay, Twint, BLIK, Bizum, MB Way). The result: highly efficient local champions… that stop dead at the border.

This fragmentation carries a strategic cost. As soon as a payment crosses a European border, it almost always runs on Visa or Mastercard rails, and pan-European e-commerce is theirs. The ECB and the European Commission have made this a matter of sovereignty, which led to the European Payments Initiative (EPI), backed by 14 major eurozone banks.

Wero: the third attempt, and the most serious one

After the failure of the Monnet project (2012) and the abandonment of EPI's card component (2022), Wero launched in mid-2024 with P2P payments in Germany, France, and Belgium, absorbing Paylib, iDEAL, and Payconiq. By the end of 2025, it claimed more than 43.5 million registered users and was rolling out e-commerce payments, first in Germany (November 2025), then Belgium (March 2026) and France (during 2026). Air France, E.Leclerc, Veepee, and Orange are among the first merchants signed. In-store payments (NFC, QR) are targeted for 2026–2027.

🌏 Asia: QR codes and super apps

Asia skipped the card stage. The West took 60 years to move from cash to cards and then to mobile; China, India, and Southeast Asia went straight from cash to QR codes in a decade. What drove the shift was the cost of acceptance. A card terminal costs hundreds of euros, while a printed QR code costs nothing: a street noodle vendor can start accepting payments in five minutes.

The second driver is the super app. Payments are not a product there but a feature at the core of an ecosystem: messaging (WeChat, KakaoTalk), e-commerce (Alipay/Taobao, Naver), or ride-hailing (Grab, Gojek). Users never “leave” the app: ordering, payment, credit, insurance, and investing their balance are all built in. This model locks in usage far more tightly than a card in a wallet.

Interoperability, the new frontier

Asian central banks have imposed unified national QR codes (QRIS in Indonesia, SGQR in Singapore, QR Ph in the Philippines, VietQR in Vietnam) to avoid a jungle of proprietary codes. The next step is cross-border links. Singapore and Thailand (PayNow↔PromptPay, 2021) led the way, and India, Malaysia, and Indonesia followed with bilateral links. The BIS's Project Nexus, signed in 2024 by India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, aims to go multilateral: a Thai tourist will scan an Indian QR code just as at home, without going through the card networks.

⚡ Pix and UPI: the instant account-to-account revolution

Two public infrastructures have proved that a national payment system can be built in a few years and outstrip 60 years of cards: UPI in India (NPCI, 2016) and Pix in Brazil (central bank, 2020). The shared recipe: a 24/7 instant rail, free for consumers, simple aliases (mobile number, email, random key), QR codes, and above all mandatory participation by the large banks, imposed by the regulator.

The impact goes beyond payments: financial inclusion (tens of millions of first active accounts), formalization of the economy (street vendors now collect traceable payments), and competition (fintechs access the public rail at the same price as banks). Brazil estimates that Pix has saved billions in interchange fees, and India has built its entire “India Stack” on UPI.

📱 Africa: mobile money before banks

In sub-Saharan Africa, the everyday payment account is not a bank account: it lives on a phone. With few bank branches and few cards, telecom operators turned airtime into money as early as 2007 with M-Pesa in Kenya. A network of neighborhood agents (shopkeepers) converts cash to e-money and back, and the whole system runs on a basic phone over USSD, with no internet connection.

Mobile money has become social infrastructure: wages, school fees, prepaid electricity, microinsurance, interest-bearing savings, and above all diaspora remittances (although their average cost remains above the UN's 3% target). The GSMA estimates its cumulative contribution to sub-Saharan Africa's GDP at several hundred billion dollars.

💳 North America: the staying power of cards and the weight of credit

While Brazil pays by Pix and India scans QR codes, Americans keep swiping cards, and that is not a sign of technological lag. The US card system is a finely tuned economic machine. High interchange (~2% on credit) funds the rewards consumers love (cash back, miles), fraud protection is strong (liability capped at $50, effective chargebacks), and revolving credit fuels consumer spending.

The US twist: wallets there do not replace cards, they wrap them. Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal carry a tokenized PAN in the vast majority of cases, so the rails, interchange, and rewards remain Visa's and Mastercard's. A2A exists (ACH for bills and payroll, Zelle for bank-to-bank P2P) but has not broken through at the point of sale. FedNow (2023) has hundreds of connected banks but still-marginal volumes, because there is no Brazilian-style regulatory mandate.

Still, things are shifting. BNPL (Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay) is taking root at checkout, regulators and lawmakers are going after fees (interchange litigation, swipe fee caps debated in Congress), and pay by bank built on open banking (Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act) is attracting large billers tired of paying 2% on recurring payments.

💵 The global decline of cash at the point of sale

In 10 years, cash has lost two-thirds of its share of in-person commerce worldwide: from 44% of point-of-sale value in 2014 to 15% in 2024 (Worldpay GPR 2025). The pandemic was a brutal accelerator, with contactless, forced e-commerce, and wariness of handling banknotes. But the underlying trend is structural: each generation of consumers uses less cash than the one before.

A word of caution: these shares are by value. By number of transactions, cash holds up much better. The ECB's 2024 SPACE study still finds that 52% of transactions at the point of sale in the euro area are in cash, but only 39% of value: banknotes are used for small amounts. Gaps within Europe are huge: Germany, Austria, and Italy remain attached to cash, while the Netherlands and the Nordic countries have all but abandoned it.

• Contactless: tapping a card or phone has removed the friction that protected banknotes for small purchases.
• Instant A2A payments: Pix, UPI, and PromptPay are going after cash where cards never broke through (street markets, informal commerce).
• Generational shift and e-commerce: online commerce, where cash barely exists, keeps growing its share.
• The cost of cash: cash-in-transit, ATMs, insurance. Banks are shrinking the infrastructure, which speeds up the decline in a self-reinforcing cycle.

🔮 2030: wallets everywhere, A2A lying in wait, invisible cards

What will global payments look like in 2030? The Worldpay Global Payments Report projects a world where the wallet is the default interface, instant A2A gains ground on card rails, and cash keeps slowly eroding without disappearing.

A methodological trap to watch for: the “wallet” category hides the underlying rail. A US wallet carries a tokenized card; an Indian or Chinese wallet carries a bank account. The 2026 GPR also reclassified part of wallet volume as A2A, which reshuffles the historical series. So the real question for 2030 is not “wallet or card?” but which rail runs under the wallet?