In my experience most countries in Europe have long had country-specific payment systems like that, with a few notable exceptions (like the UK) were everything operates on top of VISA or Mastercard.
The problem with those is usually to do payments without the physical card and cross-country payments.
The first problem has been address in the last decade or so with things mobile phone apps that read QR codes and are linked to a card or bank account (such as MBWay in Portugal and iDEAL in The Netherlands).
The second is still a big problem - some cross-country systems have appeared and some national systems interoperate, but that’s only a handful of countries each and it’s far from a pan-European system (Wero is maybe the one with the broadest geographical coverage and it still only covers 5 countries), much less something that is accepted anywhere in the World.
In Italy we have our payment processor called “Bancomat”, but it’s rarely supported outside of physical stores.
In my experience most countries in Europe have long had country-specific payment systems like that, with a few notable exceptions (like the UK) were everything operates on top of VISA or Mastercard.
The problem with those is usually to do payments without the physical card and cross-country payments.
The first problem has been address in the last decade or so with things mobile phone apps that read QR codes and are linked to a card or bank account (such as MBWay in Portugal and iDEAL in The Netherlands).
The second is still a big problem - some cross-country systems have appeared and some national systems interoperate, but that’s only a handful of countries each and it’s far from a pan-European system (Wero is maybe the one with the broadest geographical coverage and it still only covers 5 countries), much less something that is accepted anywhere in the World.