It is indeed completely unfair as Argentina is a single country of 45M people while Europe has ~10x the population and consists of 27countries - the fact that international bank transfers took longer to implement than intranational ones in a single country is kind of irrelevant? Or are you saying that argentina implemented international bank transfers (... With whom?) In only one year?
Argentina is a single country. SEPA covers 27. How long do bank transfers from Argentina to, say... Colombia take? I honestly don't know, but I'm going to assume longer than they do between EU countries.
We can benchmark both and continue the discussion since we can engage in a apples vs organges discussion. This is where qualitative metrics are important. We are talking about 7 years of difference and Argentina is a complete stalled political system. One more thing, this was in the middle of the highest crisis since 2000. At least it shows that when politicians need to move forward it happens.
BTW, Argentina also had many local banks in different regions. The EU region is just ~1.5x larger than Argentina.
Argentina: 1 country. 1 currency. 1 law applicable to the entire country.
SEPA: EU + Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom: 31 countries. 12 currencies (7 currencies in the EU alone [1]). 31 different laws (while EU countries must adhere to the overall EU laws, they are free to implement their own laws as they see fit within the general framework).
wslh: yes, yes, they are entirely comparable, after all Argentina also has regions.