That sounds like a very big mistake to me. And a missed opportunity: in some countries, banked work together to develop their own systems. People can send money to each other and pay everywhere with a small app that is not BigTech from the US.
I think there should be such an app in every country; you don't want your payment system to fully depend on US companies.
For physical transactions there's barrier of hardware and network effect - everybody has card terminal. Users expect near 100% acceptance for them to use payment method daily.
If you consider creating own NFC payment app instead of Google/Apple Pay - that's actually possible, but more expensive and often disliked by the users due to inability to easily switch between cards issued by different apps.
Is it? Last time I checked, Apple & Google were also interfacing with banks on the server side, i.e. banks had to integrate with Apple/Google specifically. I'd love to be wrong, though.
The last time I looked at it, it was not possible because Android doesn't let apps control the uid that gets used for NFC.
Either way, even if apps had full control over the chip, my understanding is that building a wallet app would still amount to much more than just interfacing with the NFC chip.
For technical side - there are companies selling complete SDKs.
While I've known that building a wallet is not as simple as configuring the NFC chip and one would have to interface with banks on the backend etc., I've failed to understand exactly why. What prevents a phone from emulating a regular physical credit card?
If this were possible fraudsters would be easily be able to clone people's cards by getting close to them. The protocol was explicitly designed for this to not be possible. There are secrets that live on the card itself and are not exposed
Behaving like a credit card does not mean that the credit card is clonable.
With some luck it will be even routed to your bank. Then it will fail due to invalid authentication. I think there's a defcon talk on YouTube that details the exchange.