It makes those payments much simpler. You don’t want to give or get a full IBAN everytime you pay at a shop.

Ethics is not the main concern here, but financial sovereignty. The ethics of US banks depends in big deal on whoever occupies the White House and their domination of digital payments can easily be used against us. So yeah, plenty to celebrate from getting our own digital payment alternative.

Some of those banks are cooperatives themselves. Anyway, the alternative is to continue totally dependent on US finance companies, so there’s that.

Well this is basically a cooperative of banks, does that count?

SIBS from Portugal has a total monopoly in the country as all banks are in it.