I'm not sure what you mean about those systems not talking to each other? I can take my Australian PayWave cards (which are actually Visa, Mastercard & Amex) and use them in Singapore and across Europe. I was using them in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria & Slovakia.
Cashless makes travelling easier. It's far easier than managing different currency for each country: SEK, DKK, SGD, EUR, AUD, some USD for those US trips, and all the small change you can't get rid of in each country. Why not use the same tap-to-pay cards that you use when at home, considering they work everywhere?
If you mean receiving money from someone while travelling, perhaps that is a more awkward case right now. But Paypal seems to work across many countries.
When it works, yes. I believe you about Europe, and perhaps Australia and Europe are politically and culturally friendly enough with each other that the businesses there made it work. But try Japan, China, Korea, for example. My Visa card wouldn't work in Japan, and in China UnionPay is pretty much the name of the game.
Also not to mention, every time I use my Visa card abroad, the fraud center tries to call me to "verify" transactions. They always call my US number (like, hello, I'm abroad, I probably can't take calls). My phone answers with a recording that says the only way to reach me is by e-mail. They don't e-mail (we're in the 21st century, hello). Then they disable my account, rendering me unable to pay for my meal in some foreign country where I can't speak the language. Then I have to call the Visa customer center, from the middle of the street, yelling my social security number and card number in open public space, "verify" some stupid transactions that I have no way to verify without logging into my account at a computer, to get my card reactivated again before I can pay and leave. Great security they have, making customers yell personal information over the phone instead of typing it in.
And yes, I tell them I'm leaving the country before I do. But they still do this. And their geography sucks. I told them I was travelling throughout Eastern Europe once and they disabled my card in Bosnia because they didn't know it was a part of the region I was travelling to.
So now, whenever I travel, I carry a spare $1K USD in cash or traveller's checks, split up and stashed on different parts of my person and luggage, for emergency situations like this, so at the very least I can buy a one-way flight ticket home if all other electronic payment fails. Cashless just doesn't work, yet.
Argh, that definitely sucks. That's not how it should work :(
Some of that seems bank related: my Australian bank emails me fraud notifications, I can add international cell numbers for txt if desired. Their website / app lets me tick off individual countries I'm visiting, and log-in to update it if I change my travel plans. If your US bank is using SSN for verification, that's dodgy :(
I feel you though, and I still take a (small) cash reserve when I travel. But I also take backup preload cards: Travelex offers Cash Passport, and both Qantas & Virgin offer Mastercard tap-to-pay built-in to their Frequent Flyer card (which also earns points). All three support Japanese Yen natively, so should work in Japan, but China and Korea are probably a no-go.
Some countries suck, though. Denmark has many misconfigured payment systems that block overseas cards (they misinterpret "Address Verification Not Available" as a decline), and you probably don't want to use cards in countries with high skimmer fraud. So we're not cashless yet, no :)
Cashless makes travelling easier. It's far easier than managing different currency for each country: SEK, DKK, SGD, EUR, AUD, some USD for those US trips, and all the small change you can't get rid of in each country. Why not use the same tap-to-pay cards that you use when at home, considering they work everywhere?
If you mean receiving money from someone while travelling, perhaps that is a more awkward case right now. But Paypal seems to work across many countries.