The current global situation is essentially an unspoken global monopoly on the world financial system that has been standing since at least the 1970s through the unholy triumvirate of SWIFT, ISO, and SIX Interbank Clearing. Credit cards are an adjunct to all this, essentially representing systematized usury and privacy loss as a requisite convenience, but they do not stand at the core. Western Union and so on are similarly edge case, but guilty.
If you are a country, you first need to be recognized by the UN in order to be recognized by the ISO. Then, you need to have your currency recognized. Finally, your central bank and national banking system need to play ball with SWIFT. If you refuse to play ball, then you don't get connected (North Korea), or get disconnected (Iran).
What do we mean here by play ball? We mean agree to give the US all of the information about all of the international financial transactions that anyone within your entire economy either does or attempts to do that cross a border. If you are a small country, this essentially draws a very accurate picture of your above board international economy including key players, volume of trade, key supply chain links, etc. To put it simply, SWIFT is one of the US' most important global intelligence assets and despite the best efforts of Europe to rid itself of SWIFT-based surveillance, it has persisted in a complete fashion (100% of all transactions) since at least 2001 (source: FOIA response, European Data Protection Supervisor, http://www.asktheeu.org/en/user/walter_stanish). (I would argue since at least the establishment of its first, hush-hush, 'International Operations Center' in the questionable location of CIA-friendly Virginia, way back in the 70s. But I digress.)
Understanding that this is the general government and international relations level background, then, let's now turn to the commercial. In order to actually create a bank account ('financial endpoint'), you basically need to be a bank. While there are often financial service provider (money transmission provider, or whatnot) categories that act as extremely limited alternatives, in reality any form of serious innovation does require being a bank. Unfortunately, to become a bank within a UN-recognized country and actually innovate, one must simultaneously face the wrath of both the entire established international system and the national government and industry of your home jurisdiction.
The solution which we are charting, is four pronged:
(1) to collaborate simultaneously with regulators across multiple jurisdictions such that a jurisdiction attempting to erect unfair barriers to innovation simply faces a direct loss of capital (as scaleup occurs);
(2) to establish forward looking financial settlement paradgims which empower the initiator to enable routing around specific assets or nations based upon their own priorities ("ethical settlement" as an adjunct to "ethical business") while using arbitrary settlement systems or assets: http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex ;
(3) to democratize the creation of individal financial endpoints ('bank accounts') by embracing and extending the emerging dominant financial standard for such, the IBAN, to a nominally familiar and interoperable system that can be decentrally allocated through a neutral party (IANA): http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/iiban
(4) To standardize the intersystem identification of non-ISO approved currencies (new release of this about to come out; ISO reformatted their source release so slightly delayed): http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/x-iso4217-a3
Regulators as well as banks and a lot of private sector businesses can see clearly that massive paradigm change is coming within global finance. Nobody quite knows how it will play out, but there are numerous significant factors supporting a shakeup: (1) the rise of China and the CNY as a reserve currency (2) Chinese parallel settlement networks (3) India and Iran's need to trade oil (4) cryptographic currencies (5) the increasingly globalized 24x7x365 nature of business (6) the inability of established banks to meaningfully innovate (is there even one globally with no downtime, where downtime includes evenings, weekends, holidays and scheduled systems maintenance?) ... we're talking 365 - 52*2 (= 104 weekend days) - 10 public holidys = ~251 days per year of actual availability, in which 80% of services are unavailable for at least 1/2 the time (6pm-6am) ... a far cry from five nines. (6) the coming rise of distributed manufacturing (7) the unsustainable social, environmental and economic costs of the current global consumer system.
We live in interesting times.