at least the swish system is set up as a collaboration between banks. it’s not its own entity. assuming most of the others work this way too, since transferring between banks takes so long.

Maybe a payment system that would only be responsible for EU transfers would be the solution? In addition to the established solutions.

Wero is the successor of Giropay which kinda went semi-obsolete with SEPA instant transfers. The original use case was telling shops that a regular SEPA transfer was guaranteed to arrive by the bank sending that information via giropay and the actual money then using regular channels. Sofort dug deeper into that market because it’s the only business they have, while giropay is little more than a thin wrapper around banks agreeing on a particular interface. Online all you really need, today, is a way for a shop to send you over to your bank with a SEPA transfer template pre-filled with the right data. That’s not a business, it’s barely even a website.

The good news, indeed, with the EPI is that the rest of Europe is finally adopting the same standards-setting procedure that Germany had for ages because we have 1400 banks over here, most of which only serve a local customer base, they need to interoperate, insular solutions just don’t make sense or you couldn’t go to an ATM the next town over. And they do have a habit of not inventing pointless intermediaries, much less intermediaries handling actual money both sender and recipients already have bank accounts why get a third bank involved.

Exactly. Even the most inclusive are hard to use when compared with using the Visa/Mastercard networks which are integrated with most banks and merchants.