Half of Visa's, and MasterCard's business model is selling payment flow. This isn't some novel development for these processors - they've been doing it for decades.
Shockingly enough, people don't care enough to shred all their credit cards! Even people who tend to get outraged on the internet about these sorts of things still have, and use at least one.
(And before someone brings up that EU is not heavy on credit cards - the function of European debit cards in this space is not one whit different from that of a credit card.)
