[tpm]

Every EU country even outside of Eurozone is in SEPA. But SEPA payments can have their own issues - I believe they were not free in all countries some time ago, not sure what the status is currently.

There might be other instant QR payment systems out there though - I digress but on our recent visit to China we had to use Alipay as the cards are not accepted at most places and of course it works through scanning QRs, either you scan the vendor's code or they scan yours, and then you enter or confirm the amount and that's it. But the issue I have with these systems is the same as yours - we are fully dependent on our phones with no backup.