"I've only just heard of this, but it looks like it's an attempt by lots of big European banks to beat Mastercard & Visa at their own game!"
Not really. Europe has Vpay and Maestro/EC. Online payments can be done in some countries by "Sofort" https://www.klarna.com/pay-now/
They may just want to standardize it for all of Europe. In general, US banking often looks like stone age compared with Europe. Alo ne a money wire is annoying. IBAN payments are free. I think they charge a small fee for instant money wires.