Global Finance: How the US System Compares

The US financial system is unusual. It has more than 4,000 insured banks where most rich countries have a handful. Its many federal and state regulators often overlap. Card payments funded by high interchange and rewards still dominate retail spending. Government-sponsored enterprises fund most of its mortgages at 30-year fixed rates. Its capital markets are the deepest in the world, and its currency is the world's. Much of what US fintechs and banks take for granted looks different elsewhere. In the UK, open banking has been mandated since 2018 and instant payments have run since 2008. India's government-sponsored UPI rail processed ~241.6bn free transactions in the year to March 2026. Brazil's central bank built Pix and made it the country's most-used payment method within a few years. China's Alipay and WeChat Pay turned apps into banks until regulators halted Ant Group's record IPO. In Kenya and Ghana, mobile operators built mass-market payment systems before banks did. This section compares the US with these systems and draws lessons for US firms at home and abroad. A worked example computes the economics of a Ghanaian mobile-money transfer, and the effect of a transaction tax on it, set against US peer-to-peer apps.