Cash has been ruling the payments economy for more than two thousand years. Even though money still makes the world go around, as Liza Minnelli sings in the famous film Cabaret from the early seventies, and probably more so than ever, notes and coins have finally come to a halt. At least in some parts of the world.
In my home country, Sweden, and in our Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway and Finland, we see the same development. Cash as payment method is fading away. I made a test before preparing this article and asked the owner of the coffee shop that I visit every morning on my way to the office how often his clients pay their latte or sandwich with cash:
“Almost never, less than one out of ten”, he said. “Cash is really decreasing.”
In our corner of Europe, we have rapidly moved into the cashless society by paying with debit and credit cards – first, we had a strange machine thing that drew a copy of the slip, then we used a pin code and since a couple of years, we have moved to a chip solution.
We are now taking the next big step by using smartphones and apps as payment methods. In Denmark, for example, a system called MobilePay which is an application for bank card payments using smartphones, is used by more than 3.6 million Danes, which represent an impressing two-thirds of the country’s entire population.
