Amazon is doing its own fintech play here, with heavy investments into Amazon Pay, Amazon Credit cards, and more. None of that seems to be driven via Stripe, but other local partners and banks instead.
SEPA's equivalent in the US is ACH, and in recent years ACH (which is a much older system) has mostly closed the gap with SEPA. Also, SEPA Instant exists, but not all banks are guaranteed to support it - as of even just a few months ago, many popular banks don't support it, which means that using SEPA reduces to ACH (in terms of payout settlement and information flow at POS).
Europe also has additional country-specific methods, so you can lean on (e.g.) iDEAL or or BACS if you know you're primarily dealing with Dutch or British customers, but that's not going to help you if you need seamless use across Europe.
ACH just never took off culturally in the US as a popular payment scheme - in part because of the easy availability of credit cards, which are usually free to the consumer and provide additional protections (such as chargebacks) that both ACH and SEPA lack. By contrast, credit card adoption is historically much lower in Europe (especially when segmented by country), so it makes sense that SEPA, for all its drawbacks, would catch on as a more popular method.
Of course, all of these pale in comparison to India's payment schemes, which are light-years ahead.
Maybe everywhere that accepts Apple Pay, but given how low credit card penetration is in Europe overall (relatively), it's almost impossible to avoid falling back on cash at some points unless you're very limited in the places you patronize.
UPI adoption is massive (and not just in India). The ubiquity of it is a huge benefit to the consumer - simply the knowledge that you can reliably depend on using it even for a random street vendor is a huge paradigm shift, compared to the status quo of knowing that it might be an option, or might not, depending on who you're talking to.
From a customer POV, UPI with it's lower success rates, no chargeback/dispute mechanism and with higher latency (take out your phone -> unlock -> open app -> click scan QR button -> enter pass -> Look at loader for 3-10 sec) is worse than debit card set up on phone / watch.
A) You have to initiate a transfer at your bank, there's no way to use ACH independently as a consumer without a commerce setup or relying on a 3rd party (like Zelle).
B) There's no confirmation step. If someone has your Account Number and Routing Number and does have a commerce setup, they can debit your account at any time.
That's actually not true - it appears that way because in practice ACH is only used in corner cases in the US, but it is absolutely possible.
> There's no confirmation step. If someone has your Account Number and Routing Number and does have a commerce setup, they can debit your account at any time.
...I have bad news for you about what the SEPA standards require!
You zelle a friend, sure, yet almost everyone I know use either Venmo or cash app (neither of which are interoperable). Everyone in India uses UPI with different flavors (Google Pay, Whatsapp Cash, Paytm, PhonePe, etc.)
Can you pay for Starbucks or a slice of pizza with Zelle? Probably not. Can you pay like 10 cents to someone selling tea in rural India with UPI? Probably yeah.
UBI is a very good system, no need to exaggerate to feel superior.
[0] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....