Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
The EU is literally working on an alternative as we speak: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
The EU would obviously benefit from a digital euro, but the banks won't give up without a fight:
https://euperspectives.eu/2026/02/digital-euro-timeline-at-r...
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
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Vietnam has a system like this too, QR based and free. India has UPI.
QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.
who are we?