Is the Golden Age of Cash Over?
For centuries starting from proto-money, golden bars and up to present day banknotes, cash has had the power of conversion into goods or other means of payment and capability of transfer to other persons. It has been perceived as a miracle, a supernatural invention praised by medieval alchemists and twentieth century financiers, but nowadays more and more companies and consumers begin to refuse accepting cash.
If we recall times during the past decade small business has been begging its customers to pay cash only, fixing minimum amount for payment by credit cards or even charging additional fees in order to minimize commission of Visa and MasterCard.
Today the majority of business goes in the exact opposite direction: waiters serve their customers with POS-terminals, supermarkets integrate self-service lines with cards-only payments, take-away cafes do not accept cash according to them it fastens the payment process and helps to increase number of served customers. Today, inconveniences in connection with the use of cash (staff training, bank charges, the cost of encashment and losses from incidental thefts) outweigh the cost of transfer fees. According to latest survey cash is being used only for purchase worth of 10 Euro or less. In the year 2016 3 of 10 purchases were made in cash, not to mention gaining popularity among consumers Apple Pay and Android Pay.
Furthermore it is worth to mention the expanding popularity of different devices used as a contactless payment method such as smartphones, payment bracelets, watches etc.
The other reason why companies prefer cards is the additional proof of identity. Have you ever tried to pay cash in any hotel in the USA? Most of them will refuse you, the reason is simple: the payment card is additional document of identification, in other words bank has already conducted the verification process of your personality. Against this background of societies popularizing the rejection of cash there are already countries where cash operations reduced to minimum: Canada — the share of non-cash payments in the total volume of consumer payments is 93%, Sweden — 92%, the share of same payments in the UK is 90%. The ranking is made based on two metrics: payments by cards and the number of issued cards per person.
Mobile applications, plastic cards and cryptocurrencies are on every turn and the paper money is being left behind. Following the most popular trends Goodx Mobile application has dared to unite past, present and future: gold as the payment method of good old days, fiat monies of today and digital currencies of the nearest future offering its customers the whole variety of available assets to be linked to their plastic cards.
Roman Ganza
COO of GoodX Finance Network
