> discriminating against Mastercard and Visa

how can you discriminate against a duopoly ;)

> It also highlights how desperately the EU is behind other countries in this space,

(you seem to be drifting into the server center topic but I will take "this space" as payment processing)

It's complicated, EU has many payment standards which 1) are required between banks, and 2) theoretically allow integration with new payment processing methods needing only the end-users agreement not the banks. So you can relatively easily send money between people (and to company accounts, too) without touching visa/mastercard at all (how easy that "relative part" does still vary a lot tho. (Also if you are willing to pay a fixed up price (commonly free or 15ct) also fast, like in seconds).

At the same time when it comes to 1) banking cards, 2) payment terminals, pretty much everything is build on Mastercard/Visa (where I live mostly Visa). Like there is no competition when it comes to the secure chips this systems use. (But then both PayPall and pretty much all of China have kinda shown you don't really need them as long as you have internet, which payment terminal often need to for any non very small payment amounts). Also because people are so used to a well working reasonable secure card payment system many tries to push for app based alternatives kinda fail, sure due to their dominant position in online shopping Paypal is still a thing, but also commonly relegate to at most one of multiple options in online shopping. Just to be clear the exact dynamics differ _vastly_ between country in the EU.

Any I really don't like the generic pay in rates functionality, it's a trap which really can fuck up peoples life (similar to using the dipso all the time/not getting out of it, or large credit boundary or however it's called for credit cards; to be honest dispo tends to be worse tho).