Yep. The EU has also enacted various regulations to enable cheap bank to bank transfers and online payments but pix seems even better - haven't use it though. 3% transaction fees are ridiculous and only possible because Visa/MC have successfully - until now - lobbied against any good alternative in the US.
Privatizing water supply is an awful deal for citizen - ask the UK - since the incentives are anti-consumer and public infrastructure is more often than not a monopoly by definition. I'd count transferring money online as public infrastructure and it should get the same treatment.
Switzerland has a huge conflict of interest with the banks and a similar P2P service (TWINT) that isn't free for merchants. This service is owned by the same banks that are supposed to by law implement instant IBAN to IBAN but of course those same banks have added fess to this.
Our popular QR payment system, known as MobilePay, is owned by banks that have a financial interest in letting payments continue to process via visa/mc cards underneath, as they get a big interchange fee from reusing the legacy payment system. (around 0,2% interchange on a typical danish visa transaction).
In the past, we had a popular nationally owned cheaper safeguard against foreign payment monopolies in the form of Dankort, a local visa/mc alternative, but the company operating Dankort (NETS) has been sold by our gov+danish banks to an american equity firm, further removing any incentive for danish banks to not just quietly force visa/mc on everyone, so Dankort is now slowly dying.
The rent seeking is made even more perverse by the EU PSD2 legislation from 2018 that makes it illegal to forward payment fees onto shoppers, which removes all the textbook consumer behavior (judging price vs quality) from the equation.
That law has created a situation where shoppers use whatever payment method their bank hands out to them and merchants are forced to blindly accept whatever shoppers use and pay up the fees which goes back to the same banks that decided what to give shoppers in the first place.
End result of this is that the banks best move is to push visa/mc, make everything seem hard to change & confuse politicians.
Systems like Pix give me hope but I don't believe the existing system can be saved, it needs to be replaced by a new actor, aggressively supported at EU or national level, probably both.
BTW in the EU they successfully just declared, by fiat, that card networks could set their fees to 0.2% or lower, or they could fuck off. And suddenly the fees were, magically, 0.2%, and the card networks still choose to operate in the EU which proves they're still making money. There are no credit card rewards, but so what - that was just your money getting returned to you anyway.
The UK has free and fast bank transfers for consumers but that is not quite reliably fast enough to be a payment mechanism for most purchases, nor can it be easily tied to transactions.
The problem with things like UK water is privatisation and bad regulation. UK rail privatisation has not been too bad (the numbers do not support the claims made about it making things worse) - successful enough that the EU seems heading towards emulating it.
Privatizing water supply is an awful deal for citizen - ask the UK - since the incentives are anti-consumer and public infrastructure is more often than not a monopoly by definition. I'd count transferring money online as public infrastructure and it should get the same treatment.