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> SWIFT/IBAN

You might be thinking about SEPA. SWIFT is slow, expensive and also available in the US.

One reason is that credit card fees are much higher than in Europe (up to 3% or so) due to lack of regulation (of course a significant proportion of those fees are returned to the card users as cashback, so it’s not like American companies are much more greedy, it’s still not a very efficient system of course..)

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You're probably right about SWIFT/SEPA part. My bad, apologies.

And it's just not the credit cards. Many people here (including high school students) are provided and using debit cards for virtually everything.

The US has debit cards as well, the security assumptions regarding bank accounts are very different and there is also a culture of building a credit score that reduces debit card use.

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