Unfortunately EPI has stalled, I don't know if we'll ever see MC/Visa cards co-branded with a pan-European scheme.

However, the free market approach seems to work for mobile payments solutions such as the extremely popular ones in nordic countries. They have started to build an interoperable and federated network in Europe and beyond. For instance, there's a real demand from businesses that want to let Chinese or Indian tourists pay with AliPay or UPI.

Don't get me wrong, I think DSP is one of the greatest thing the EU has ever done, but it looks like physical cards just need to die before we can see a true competition.

You're referring to the launch of FedNow, right? It's interesting because most of the analysis I've seen keeps assuming it'll be more B2B and that people will just continue to use P2P apps. However, I don't see any reason said apps won't move to FedNow themselves. The underlying ACH should be fairly easy to swap out with FedNow, right? Venmo and CashApp have only free money (in the form of lower fees and faster settlement) and better security to gain, it feels like.