November 25, 2015

Who exactly is trying to kill off Cash?

By Don Quijones  • November 24, 2015
Your Children “Will Not Know What Cash Is.”
By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET

In the Irish city of Cork, business leaders recently launched a three-month pilot project to encourage consumers to abandon the archaic use of cash by offering the chance to enter into a prize draw if they use electronic means of payment. It is a cheap, almost insulting inducement, but nonetheless probably an effective one. The ultimate aim of the scheme is to transform Cork into the first Irish city to go completely cashless.

The Race to Kill Off Cash

A few years ago such an aspiration — to do away with physical cash, a form of payment that has served mankind, for better or worse, richer or poorer, for millennia — might have seemed a little odd. Not anymore. Today cities all over the globe and even entire nations appear to be in a mad rush to kill off cash.

One obvious place that springs to mind is Scandinavia, where Denmark and Sweden are engaged in a neck and neck race to become Europe’s first cashless nation. But the trend extends far beyond Scandinavia. In London, where physical money has been practically abolished from the public transport system, the borough of Brent has proudly declared itself the first district council to go completely cashless — with a little bit of help from MasterCard.

In May this year the city of Bergamo launched an ambitious pilot scheme to become Italy’s first cashless city. The initiative, which awards people who use electronic payments with discounts on retail products, is sponsored by (once again) MasterCard, together with CartaSi, Visa, UbiBanca, Banca Popolare di Bergamo and Banco Popolare.

Meanwhile, in the UK region of South Gloucestershire, the local Conservative Party is spitting venom about the lack of “a genuinely comprehensive, multi-model, London-style [i.e. completely cashless] ‘Oyster’ payment system” for new planned Metrobus routes.

“If the Metrobus is really going to present the traveling public with something different, then the Authority must insist that electronic alternatives to the issuing of paper tickets by drivers is made a contractual condition of any procurement or tender,” thunders Cllr Lucas. “A ‘Brunel’ card would avoid all of the easily foreseeable problems such as unnecessary delays, engineered congestion, confusion, and fragmented service coverage which arise from sticking with traditional forms of payment.”

These are all small, anecdotal examples of a very large, potentially world-changing trend. As I reported in “First They Came for the Pennies in the War on Cash ,” the world’s biggest cashless laboratory is sub-Saharan Africa, where Western NGOs and GOs (Government Organizations) are working hand-in-hand with banks, telecom companies, and local authorities to replace cash with mobile money alternatives.

Click on Link:
http://wolfstreet.com/2015/11/24/the-death-of-cash/