Yes, the American banking system is just ridiculously bad. I remember studying abroad in New Zealand (in 2004!) and marveling at how EFTPOS was universal, everything was chip & pin, and funds transfers could easily be done online (and often clear the same day!). The cashiers would look at me strangely with my American credit card, and they would always check the signature. (Which, it may astound foreigners to learn, most American cashiers do not. How do we prevent credit card fraud? We don't, in general. Fraud losses over $50 are reimbursed by the credit card company, if you report them, which makes it up out of exorbitant interest rates that they charge people dumb enough to carry a balance.) The U.S. finally got some of the security measures the rest of the world has (chip & PIN, for example) around 2017, and in many regards is still behind.

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).