> For another, this ended up being an almost peculiarly American experience. In Europe, regulators were worried about the cost of interchange to businesses (rather than consumers) and capped it. Since issuers didn’t have the margin to compete on rewards paid for by interchange, they instead leaned into branding and convenience, and credit cards became a smaller portion of the payment mix (about 47% of electronic payments, compared to almost 70% in the U.S.).
First, the 47% is for all types of cards, debit and credit. Second in the SEPA space (at least the eurozone), wire transfers are free of charge, and are frequently used(for rent, salary, buying a kitchen, even between friends, at least in France), which removes some of the uses for bank cards. Furthermore, bank cards usually have limits, so buying expensive things (like a car or kitchen) isn't necessarily straightforward, unlike a wire transfer. IMHO shit prices and delays are the reason peope in the US often use cheques where in the EU we'd use a wire transfer, and it isn't really true that cards are less used here.