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 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.