Adyen does a good job providing a developer-centric platform with robust controls around fraud rules and other elements. I'd encourage you to benchmark them. You and your colleagues can also drop me an email anytime to discuss: [email protected].
The European payments landscape is much, much different:
1. Because they make less money on cards and card networks are controlled by pushy American corporations, European banks actively campaign against the use of cards online. So instead of feeling confident in Zero Fraud Liability as they are here, consumers in Europe are scared of getting hacked.
2. In some countries, banks don't even print the card number on the card, so you can't use them online if you want to.
3. Cards do not have rewards, so there's much less incentive to use them, even if they could.
4. As a result, consumers are accustomed to using "bank buttons" which let them log into their bank site to push a payment.
5. But that becomes really complex when you have more than 6 banks in a market, so solutions like SOFORT simplify by creating a centralized bank button.
In short, Americans value rewards and convenience whereas Europeans value security. There have been several ACH-based online payment efforts in the US (eBillMe, Mazooma, Noca, etc.) and all have failed.
Large banks aren't opposing faster payments anymore. It's my understanding that the NACHA membership voted to approve Same Day ACH and it will be phased in over the course of 2016-2018. In addition, the largest FIs are creating an actual real-time ACH system through The Clearing House, which has licensed technology from VocaLink (the developer/operator of the UK's Faster Payments system) and FIS to do so.
Bank transfers don't really cost $5. The typical price for an ACH transfer is more like $0.05, down to $0.01 at scale. Stripe is making a nice profit on these because it's really hard to get an FI to do this for you if you are a startup.
"In the US Stripe charges 2.9%. That's 66% more than in Australia. Do you think it costs Visa that much extra to process a payment in the US? No, it clearly does not."
Yes, actually, it does. Payment processors like Stripe (technically, an ISO) and its merchant acquirer partners must pass through most of their fees as interchange to the bank which issues a card. Those fees are much higher here in the U.S. versus Australia, where they are regulated.
A typical U.S. payment processor charges ~2.3%, of which the processor retains 0.5%, 0.1% goes to Visa, and the remaining ~1.7% goes to the card issuer. (This averages out card-present and card-not-present sales across all sizes of merchants, and is just a rough estimate, so no judgement on Stripe's fee level, which is reasonable for a simple blended rate for e-commerce.) All of the processor's product development, marketing, operations, profit, etc., have to come from that small 0.5% margin. (That said, it's still a good business, with 50% margins at scale.)
No, all debit was regulated. As @pc said, the difference is whether or not the issuing bank has $10 billion in assets. Some kinds of prepaid debit cards are also excluded from the regulation.