Moving to the US is like stepping back into the 70's, and then discovering that everyone around you think that everything is fine, their banks are fine, that US banks are somehow modern and cool.
Anecdote: I wired some money from my Chase bank account to my Swedish bank account, in USD. I made the transfer through the internet bank, but since it was "after hours" New York time, it was scheduled to transfer the next morning.
Early next morning I checked my Swedish bank account, they had received the money, exchanged it to SEK at a decent rate, and the money was immediately available for me to spend there.
A couple of hours later I receive an email from Chase, where they're telling me that they've now sent the money, and that I should expect to see the money in my Swedish bank account about three days later.
American banks suck.
I need to call my bank to temporarily unlock it if I ever go to the US. Payments with PIN code are allowed by default though even in the US. So the problems seem to be with the swipe system.
America has the downsides of being the first-mover and of being dominant. A lot of our system was built before modern computerization and then retrofitted for the bank's convenience (not the customer's), and because the U.S. economy & military is so dominant, the rest of the world has to deal with the U.S. financial system as it exists now. That means that there's very little pressure on existing U.S. retail financial institutions to improve, and a lot of regulations and institutional inertia keeping out new entrants.
It's much the same situation with Internet access (where our consumer Internet speeds are often 2 orders of magnitude slower than in much of the rest of the world) and in health care (where we spend the most but have one of the worst life expectancies of developed nations).