Comment by kjetijor
9 hours ago
"decades ago"
Granted, I'm mostly familiar with the Scandinavian bit of Europe, but you can't do jack shit with banking without 2FA which is tied into the national population register.
They decided in the 80ies or 90ies that "relying on knowing secret fixed magic numbers" was not ideal for authenticating people, and sat down and worked out solutions to that problem.
There's still the SEPA direct debit payments in Germany, so you basically give your bank details and the company takes the money out of your account once a month. These don't exist in Scandinavia, but are very much still the norm in Germany.