[inopinatus]

> It amazes me how seemingly behind US banking is tech-wise.

This is a statement true in other infrastructure domains, from plumbing to roads to healthcare. It was explained to me that although the US possesses world-class technology in practically every field, the deployment is mediated through a fragmented and diverse political economy.

That’s when I properly internalised how the US is federated not merely at the top level, but through many strata of localised governance, and the practical consequences thereof.

Couple this to the inertia of regulatory capture by entrenched wealth (which occurs in all human systems irrespective of political construct) and it’s easy to accept that US retail banking, which is approaching three centuries of uptime, will be a very late adopter of mass-market technology.

[riffraff]

This sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure it's all the explanation.

The EU is far more fragmented at a government level, but chip&pin cards where much more common than in the US far earlier.

Likewise, mobile communication was far better in Europe 20 years ago than it was in the US (all of Europe had GSM while the US was insanely fragmented).

And the EU was able to push the open banking directive with relative ease while the US still seems to have nothing comparable.

So it seems to me there's something else in play that explains your observation.

[inopinatus]

> So it seems to me there's something else in play that explains your observation.

There is, and with apologies for the late reply, I'll unpack one term I used, which is diversity. I've lived and worked all over the EU and feel comfortable observing that practically all EU national, regional, and local governments are politically clustered within one deviation of the International Standard Social Democracy. What's more, they actively work together at the top level to promote harmonisation of processes and industrial/commercial/technical/legal/administrative standards.

I'll contrast this with the US where the political window is splattered all over the compass, process & technical standards are driven by corporations that actively seek to differentiate themselves from one another, and regional and local political groupings will take a deliberately contrarian tack on a diverse policy spectrum in order to more clearly disambiguate themselves from opposing forces and to segment and cement their constituencies.

I believe the latter drives more innovation through competition, but distributes it more unevenly. And I'm neither a US citizen or (currently) resident, just a frequent visitor both for work and play, but I also think that the greatest single quality of the US is being the only country where practically anyone, regardless of cultural backdrop or however divergent their social/political preferences, might hope to find a community of like-minded individuals. What that isn't: a recipe for harmony.

[fastball]

The reason for that is because the US was "standardizing" finance before the EU even existed, and therefore has momentum from those standards that needs to be overcome in order to adopt new standards.

e.g. having strong anti-fraud/anti-theft practices built around signatures.

[pgeorgi]

European countries were also standardizing finance before the EU existed, but that meant that there already was the infrastructure of banks working together (in each country) that was then used to establish the EU wide protocols.

In comparison US banking seems rather adversarial in nature and so there are few interbanking standards which led to the need of a layer on top in the form of credit card companies to abstract away the differences.

[Razengan]

> the deployment is mediated through a fragmented and diverse political economy.

Not to mention that bizarre toxic mindset of "I'm losing money (taxes) if someone else is getting comfortable."

[haltingproblem]

Underrated comment. You have managed to eloquently and elegantly summarize why the US is slow in adopting new standards - be it banking or the CMDA/TDMA mess.