Wero expands merchant payments in France with Orange

Wero is moving further beyond its origins as a peer-to-peer payment service, with Orange becoming the first merchant in France to offer subscription bill payments through the European Payments Initiative’s account-to-account platform.

The move allows customers of Orange’s Sosh mobile brand to settle subscription bills directly through their banking app, without entering card details separately. The service is initially available to BNP Paribas customers and is expected to expand to other French banks during the second half of 2026.

Orange has worked with AXEPTA BNP Paribas on the technical processing of the transactions.

The development is significant because it extends Wero into a recurring merchant-payment use case, an area that could broaden its relevance considerably beyond person-to-person transfers and one-off ecommerce payments.

Wero has already built meaningful scale, with close to 40 million users in France and more than 58 million across Europe.

Its expansion into bill payments reflects EPI’s ambition to make the service a broader European payments proposition rather than simply another digital wallet for consumer transfers.

Orange had already supported Wero for online payments in France, but the addition of subscription billing represents a further step towards embedding the service in everyday payment journeys.

Elsewhere, German retailer dm has also introduced Wero into its online checkout, underlining growing merchant interest in European account-to-account payment options.

The next challenge for EPI will be to turn that early acceptance into regular usage across ecommerce, recurring payments and eventually physical retail.

At the same time, EPI has entered the final stage of migrating Luxembourg from Payconiq to Wero, making the country Wero’s fourth European market after Belgium, France and Germany.

The Wero app became available in Luxembourg from 1 September 2026, with banks and payment providers moving customers progressively across the platform during the month. Payconiq is due to close on 30 September, although existing QR codes will continue to function until the end of the year.

The migration includes customers of BIL, BGL BNP Paribas, Banque Raiffeisen, POST Luxembourg and Spuerkeess.

Users will retain existing Payconiq functionality while gaining access to Wero’s cross-border payments and future services including subscription payments, payment-on-delivery, one-click checkout and contactless in-store transactions.

Wero’s expansion is part of a wider attempt to create a European-controlled payments infrastructure capable of competing more effectively with international card schemes and global digital wallets.

For EPI, the strategic question is now shifting from whether Wero can achieve initial distribution to whether it can generate sustained merchant and consumer usage.

The Orange rollout is therefore more than another acceptance announcement. It demonstrates how Wero is beginning to move from a domestic P2P proposition towards a broader commercial payments platform—and, potentially, towards becoming a more credible pan-European alternative in digital payments.