Why is the US so incredibly backward with day-to-day use of money? As a Kiwi it's like jumping back thirty or forty years in time when I visit.
e.g. The NZ banks jointly own the company that processes EFTPOS payments. A system like that could never emerge in the US. Instead, people have debit cards, which are manageable because they go through the credit card companies and there are only a handful of those.
But yeah, it's all incredibly primitive and fraud-prone compared to NZ or Europe (I've lived in all three).
Scale might explain it for individual countries situation
But it still has introduced SEPA over its whole area. If anything, a country should have less of a problem than a still somewhat disjoint union of 28 countries.