ING Bank in Germany plans to roll out Wero directly into its mobile banking app for about ten million customers in August. Wero is the PayPal-style service of the European Payments Initiative, enabling real-time transfers to a recipient by mobile number or e-mail address without needing an IBAN. It launched last year and has been gradually adopted in Germany through partner banks such as Sparkassen and Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken, with a standalone Wero app available at Postbank. ING’s move could give Wero momentum as the initiative seeks broader European coverage. The initiative reports roughly 43 million registered users across participating countries, compared with PayPal’s roughly 35 million active German accounts. ING, with about 40 million customers across Europe, says it will push to make Wero a success and move toward greater autarky in its own payments ecosystem.

The drama behind these numbers is not the mere mechanics of transfers but the shaping of a framework within which price signals travel and knowledge disperses. To crave less dependence on US networks is understandable in a world where political tides shift and sovereignty is reinterpreted through data and money alike. Yet the creation of a pan-European payments rail, even under the banner of private banks, risks becoming a new central pillar of coordination—an architecture that, once massed, can dampen the very competition and improvisation that gave such systems their vitality in the first place.

Autarky in payments sounds prudent, almost prudent enough to be wise, but true autonomy is not insulation from the world; it is the preservation of freedom to exchange through institutions that are open, contestable, and governed by general rules rather than by the edicts of a few. When a coalition of large banks builds a dominant platform, the potential for rents, gatekeeping, and regulatory capture grows, and with it the danger that innovation slows and prices harden. The real question is whether this European effort will maintain the lively friction of a marketplace—where alternatives can emerge, where data portability and interoperable standards enable newcomers to challenge incumbents, and where users retain sovereignty over their own information and choices.

Speed and convenience, of course, are immense gains. Real-time payments and the elimination of IBAN friction can accelerate commerce and everyday life. But speed must not become a substitute for competition, nor policy aims for independence become excuses to erect a more brittle, less adaptable payment lattice. If Wero becomes a serious competitor by embracing openness, portability, and truly neutral governance, it may advance liberty by reducing the tyranny of distance and the power of any single network to dictate terms. If, on the other hand, it calcifies into a curated ecosystem of a few powerful banks, it will resemble a planned spine rather than a living, adaptive market—an architecture that, in the long run, undermines the very spontaneous order that makes such systems resilient and beneficial for all participants.