For exchanges, yes. For merchants, no.

After looking around a bit more, I found this link here, which seems to suggest a KYC implementation is still in progress, since existing services don’t meet their criteria.

Merchants can’t take possession of the funds, the exchange determines when the money is sent.

The Wire deadline as you mentioned later limits how long they can keep the money, and if they are purposefully delaying, they could be investigated by an oversight body or go unused compared to an exchange that does not.

but given that shortening it makes the refund UX worse I’m not sure it’s ideal. It’s weird to have this be a tradeoff anyway.

I can’t say I disagree entirely, and I would hope that such oddities would be improved in the future.

Fees differ per country […]

Cheers for the info and link, that does make it quite cheap, I must say.

Based on that, Wero is objectively an improvement over the credit card monopoly or paypal. However I fear that if it wins out this payment war, it will end up being the only option, and I very much doubt that it will ever implement the privacy features from GNU Taler that I consider absolutely paramount for a future digital payment system to not be abused in the future. We’re already seeing how governments are pushing for less online privacy with the constant Chat Control legislation, which we’re only narrowly avoiding, and with far right parties across Europe gaining more and more of the vote, I very much think it prudent to advocate for privacy respecting technologies wherever possible, even at the expensive of some convenience.