These are not open or interchangeable standard, they aren't interested in that. They want our valuable transactional data, and location when those are made.

QR codes are a standard. It allows any bank to issue funds. It's a wire transfer. Transfer are a standard. Any bank can adopt it. Typically a bank adopts it..it doesn't require a specific device or partnership for merchant, nor the payer.

It also offers the ability to transfer funds remotely. In that sense it is more so contact "less" than the proximity handshake that contactless payments do, which is somewhat proprietary.

You can save a QR code, make a payment later. QR codes also are more intuitive because they represent an identity. An electronic device that can be swapped, tempered with, is unhelpful to help figure out a fraud or who we are actually paying until the handshake happens.

More importantly they don't incur a hidden fee for either the payer or merchant. Because it's a transfer. Not a transfer disguised as card payment.

A QR code scan keep the payer in control. Merchant presents an amount to pay, payer initiates the transactions, approves, and gets a confirmation. Can use bank A, or Y, or even a bank in another country, so long as it supports QR scan and a fast wire so that the merchant can be assured the transfer is well received.

Also to say, cash remains. That's more radical and effective as a fall back than a card which one can lose. When abroad I remember the anxiety of losing my wallet when abroad. With a phone, it's actually less problematic to walk into a shop, get the cheapest android in there and set up all my banking on it. Half a day of a holiday wasted, that's an acceptable inconvenience given the risk. Losing a card, not really.

Europeans use these dispute protections much less, so Visa/Mastercard are mostly seen as expensive pass-throughs.

And in Europe, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they just associate the name with refused payments at points of sale depending on the luck they had with the merchant, or the foreign country, etc.

I do agree that in this case, picking MC/VISA is not really important. When I changed banks a few years ago, it so happened that I switched from a Visa to a Mastercard. Nothing changed save for the logo on the card.

… banks saw big, no, BIG $$$ and lost their minds. The transition was rather swift: between the very late 2000's and approximately 2015 (give or take a few years), the transition had been complete. Credit cards became a massively profitable and booming business for the banks, with all sorts of loyalty programmes and bonuses (at consumers’ expense, of course, as the banks also jacked up interest rates on revolving credits). Note that all of this took place before national governments stepped in to regulate the transaction fees.

This coincided with the growing allergy of Western governments to owning any critical infrastructure (including payment networks) and the rising trend of outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector. As it is easy to imagine, it did not take long for the national banks already being in bed with Visa/MC to convince their respective national governments to stop investments in maintenance and enhancement of domestic payment networks and delegate the payment processing to the cartel: «they can do it better than you do».

… all of which has led us to where we are right now. Technically, national payments are still alive, but they are more in the contained mode of operation and not in active use or development.