> They still had chip&pin before US banks, and dropped unsafe cheques before US banks.

Oh, I never banked in the US, so I can't comment on them from a consumer point of view.

> The US banking system, afaik, did one thing better: credit cards. But since the '00s, European ones have been just as good and often better.

I used credit cards perhaps a handful of times in my life. It's almost exclusively been debit cards for me.