* Your bank account is attached to a specific bank branch. Even after we moved across town, we always had to return there, like spawning salmon. Moving it seemed like we were asking them to give their children up for adoption. * The hours they were open were bad even by Italian standards. * Lots of little fees and things. Credit cards cost actual money to possess; compared to the US where you get money back if you use one sensibly.
And they've been doing this as a general-case, as systems tend to be global with local characteristics and lots of glue rather than a decade back when they were disparate and lacking glue.
So when, Singapore for example, decides it wants PSD2 too (good example test case r.e. stringent data protection from regulator and competitive market) they can roll-out quickly.
- SMS-TAN, which is vulnerable to SS7 hijacking and name spoofing.
- Index-TAN, aka the enumerated paper slip, which is only "pseudo two-factor": If you computer is pwned, it can ask you for the index matching the attacker's desired transaction.
They still have weird, mostly paper-based processes and decades-old mainframes (though that's not necessarily a bad thing). Not long ago the 2nd factor consisted of a paper slip with enumerated transaction numbers.
You'd have a hard time finding a bank that allows you to easily export data to accounting software. APIs accessible to customers are something unheard of.
All that nagging aside, a reason for US banks being even more stuck in the 70s might be the success of credit cards. Until the mid-90s hardly anyone used those in Europe and they're still not all that common, which in turn means that most cashless payments happen via some sort of card issued by banks directly.