And in China, more than 90 percent of city-dwellers said they used WeChat Pay and Alipay as their primary payment method, a study by the Brookings Institution found.īut while the move towards a ‘cashless’ future might not be anything new, many experts believe the pandemic is likely to have sped up the trend.Īmong them is Natalie Ceeney, Chair of Innovate Finance and leader of the 2019 Access to Cash Review study, which looked at consumer cash needs in the UK. In the UK, cash payments were predicted to represent just nine percent of all transactions by 2028, according to a 2019 report by UK Finance. The pandemic has accelerated the move away from cash usage and the adoption of contactless payments instead Sweden had already gone almost entirely cashless – at the start of 2018, only one percent of the country’s GDP was circulating as cash – and Finland was edging ever closer too, with the central bank having forecast a cash-free society by 2029. This shift hasn’t come out of the blue, of course the idea of a ‘cashless society’ has been touted for years, dating back as early as the 1960s with the advent of credit cards, and spurred on by the rise of electronic banking, digital wallets and mobile payment systems, made possible by the explosion of fintech firms such as Venmo, iZettle, Swish and PayPal.
The explosion of online shopping further contributed to the trend, with consumers turning to online systems such as PayPal to make their transactions Amazon’s revenue increased 37 percent to a record $96bn in Q3, as shoppers across the world flocked to the e-commerce giants to get their goods. A study by data firm Dynata found the preference for cash dropped by 31 percent in the early months of the pandemic across the countries surveyed, and YouGov research found that ATM withdrawals in the UK had fallen by around 60 percent over lockdown. In response, retailers across the world began putting more emphasis on cashless transactions, with contactless payments growing by more than 40 percent globally in the first quarter of 2020, according to a survey by Mastercard. The WHO later pushed back on the claim, declaring it had never issued any official warnings – but it wasn’t the only whisperings of ‘dirty cash.’ China had already begun sterilising money in February out of hygiene concerns, and in March the US Federal Reserve started quarantining dollars from Asia, begging an important question: how clean was cash?
In March 2020, reports claimed the World Health Organisation (WHO) had warned against using cash amid fears it could be spreading coronavirus.
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