Cash is on the way out. Or so advocates for a cashless society would have us believe. Certainly we’re tapping, swiping and clicking at checkouts –virtual and physical – in ever greater numbers. It’s also true that in many developed countries, paying with cash is in steep decline. The volume of cash payments in the UK, for example, plunged by nearly 60 per cent between 2008 and 2019, while in Norway cash is now used in just 4 per cent of transactions. One widely quoted report predicts that the global transition from cash to digital will reach a tipping-point in 2025, and the pandemic, in which contactless payments surged, has only exacerbated this trend.
Yet when you take a closer look at the data, a rather different picture emerges. Not only are as many as 1.7 billion people globally stranded outside of the digital payments ecosystem – for reasons such as poor credit ratings – and are therefore utterly dependent on cash, but the total value of cash in circulation has been on the rise for years. In the Eurozone the value of banknotes in circulation more than doubled between 2008 and 2021 to €1.4 trillion.
In this virtual briefing, Robert Albrecht, head of Paysafecash, Paysafe Group joins WIRED’s deputy global editorial director Greg Williams to find out why cash is enjoying a comeback, and how technology is already bridging the off- and online worlds for the “unbanked” and financially excluded.
If you would like to find out more about the Future of Cash, please read our recently published ebook – created in partnership with Paysafecash. You can view it here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
