There's no laws banning this in any European countries that I'm aware of, except maybe Hungary? It's just banks being stupid, consumer-hostile, and anti-competitive.
Well, I've built a bunch of mobile banking apps and we did detect if the phone was rooted, was in dev mode, etc. and it is not because we were "stupid, consumer-hostile, and anti-competitive".
If someone steals the secrets from a rooted phone and steals customer's money the bank is on the hook, so banks do everything they can to minimize this risk.
There is no way to store customer's secrets in a PC browser securely, so all the "dangerous" transactions were outright prohibited in the web app or made available only via temporary QR login.
All this is just is a negative side effect of customer protection laws.
These practices are strengthening the Google/Apple hegemony and are ultimately damaging user freedoms and consumer protections. I'm sure that's not your employer's intention, but it is a negative thing that they're contributing to. And because of how essential banking is, banks have a big thumb on this particular scale, and I wish they'd use it for good rathet than for enriching and entrenching evil.
> If someone steals the secrets from a rooted phone and steals customer's money the bank is on the hook, so banks do everything they can to minimize this risk.
Now that's just not true now, is it? Sure the lawyers told you that (the ones that get paid to tell you that), but nowhere in EU was a bank actually fined for not root checking a device.
They were plenty fined by being utterly incompetent with security practices and doing them poorly - like trying to inject wierd .SOs to do the root detection you're defending.
"Payment service providers (PSPs) operating in the EU will have to cover customers’ losses from fraud if their fraud protection regimes are inadequate or poorly implemented under new EU rules."
The fact that no root lockout means "inadequate protection" is something you projected onto this statement and that's the part I'm addressing in my comment.
No one actually got fined for root protection specifically.
Regulators love vague standards like "inadequate protection" because it means they can implement a ratchet effect without needing to understand anything or constantly rewrite the laws. If someone gets hurt they just look around at whatever the competition is doing, pick the most extreme thing, and declare that any other standard is inadequate.
So sure, if you want to not use security tactics your competitors are using and then try to lawyer out of it by arguing, "it didn't specifically say we had to do that" in front of the EU Commission, go ahead. But don't blame the banks that are more realistic about how this works.
No bank got fined for not root checking, correct. However banks are on the hook for unauthorized transactions. And "unauthorized" means different thing in different countries.
In some jurisdictions if bank can prove that transaction was made with customer's key then customer can not demand their money back. That's the best case, but there are only few of such jurisdictions and even there the burden of proof is on the bank and it costs a lot.
In other jurisdictions bank must reverse a transaction even if it was proven that the transaction was signed with a legitimate key, but the key _may_ have been stolen.
In some jurisdictions (i.e U.S.) banks are required to reverse a transaction at a customer’s request, even if the customer does not dispute having made the transaction.
In any case dealing with all this is too expensive and risky.
Let's say you are a bank and you make $10 on each $100K transfer. If customer disputes a transaction and you must return the money, you lose the whole amount and twice as much on lawyers, internal audit, compliance people working on the case.
With this math you can't afford the risk if it is more than 1 in 30000.
For many European banks the math is even more brutal.
Practically impossible to store secrets in a desktop app too.
Besides, customers would not willing to install a desktop app. And those who would, will require support.
And surprisingly I can pay securely using my PC, fully rooted, on FOSS software. Hardware tokens have been a thing for decades. There are more second (or third) factor authentication and signing solutions than I can enumerate.
Do peope get defrauded using online banking? Sure. But usually not in a way that would be stopped by secure attestation.