>>76617892000 characters is a pain in the ass.
VISA and Mastercard are publicly traded companies. Their aim is to make their number go up. This is primarily achieved via having people who aren't on credit sign up for new cards and use them, as that signals growth to the stock market. This has slowed in the west because of a stagnation/decline in population growth as well as just it reaching the point where the only people without some kind of a card are innawoods schizos.
Additionally, the more uncleared debt in the system, the more money they create, and the more a card is used the more they get to skim fees off the top.
Thus the priority is to get as many people as possible to open new accounts each quarter. This is achieved by going international. But that's got an issue in that the target countries (with millions of people not on international credit) are run by petty strongmen, religious cults, and conflicting factions of 70-IQ retards who worship statues and riot in exchange for being given gruel, rice and bread.
So the credit companies have to "play nice" by keeping their image as clean as possible. It seems irrational from the western side because it's the companies trying to appease actors whose aims are pure power, not profit or morality.
That's the problem right now. The 2nd layer has to do with legal impositions that western governments placed in their march towards being a surveillance state.