It's counter-intuitive, but if you think about it, less develop countries are in a better position to deploy fully integrated systems.
E.g.: Portugal has a great, free, cross-bank, ATM system since the beginning [1] because Portuguese banks were late to the party in regards to deploying such machines. They could learn from other countries and create a more resilient system, which has since been expanded to be able to pay various services, from utilities, fines, tolls, phones, withdrawals without cards (with phone), etc. Countries that developed earlier have to suffer with a lot of baggage and the Banking industry is not known for it's desire to innovate its tech.
FYI, the term for this is leapfrogging -- essentially the lack of infrastructure allows developing countries to suddenly advance past established countries in terms of policy/tech integration & utilization. In other words, no tech debt to pay off first :-)
How’s MBpay? I loved using Multibanco when living in Portugal but I never got around to using MBpay, which I think is the equivalent to what’s being discussed for the US, essentially.
E.g.: Portugal has a great, free, cross-bank, ATM system since the beginning [1] because Portuguese banks were late to the party in regards to deploying such machines. They could learn from other countries and create a more resilient system, which has since been expanded to be able to pay various services, from utilities, fines, tolls, phones, withdrawals without cards (with phone), etc. Countries that developed earlier have to suffer with a lot of baggage and the Banking industry is not known for it's desire to innovate its tech.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multibanco