Spoken as the incumbent. Of course it's a technical problem, as least as much as other SV companies. Hard tech hasn't been the edge for SV for many decades and it's getting even less important today. All the big companies has tried to tackle payments, but with lackluster results. What's "perfectly fine" for the US isn't in most of the rest of the world. Some of the more prominent startups in the UK, Germany and Sweden are payment related exactly because SV is weak in this area. There's a great opportunity for Chinese companies here if they ever decide to go outside their own borders.
I don't see how that is adding anything to the discussion. If you want to be the leader you actually have to lead. You have to be the one that figures out "the future" and have the solution people didn't know they wanted before other people do. The "perks" of mobile payments should be fairly obvious to anyone who has experienced it, I suspect you and the parent just aren't one of those people. No one is going to stop the US to remain dysfunctional in infrastructure, but it still has a price.
My (admittedly snarky) point was that there are clear differences between countries in their preferences for payment systems that can't be chalked up to "dysfunctional infrastructure." And it's not a US vs. rest of world thing. Even across Europe there are clear differences in cash vs. debit card vs. credit card vs. etc. acceptance. And stored value cards (for use outside of transit systems) seems mostly to be an Asian thing. I have certainly used mobile phone payments in Europe where chip without PIN can sometimes be a bit of a pain because it's not part of the normal checkout process. In the US, I find just using a credit card is a bit easier even if I know a store accepts mobile payments.
Something like WeChat really isn't like cards though. It's more like cash, cards and bank transfers in one. Like if most everyone would accept Paypal for everything without fees and it was integrated everywhere (web, store, phone, chat etc).
