Is A Cashless Society Around The Corner?

Times have changed in the past few years and cash is slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past, from Apple Pay to swiping your contactless card at the local shop. Statistics confirm that over 54% of people in the uk are opting for cashless payments. Do we really understand as a nation what slipping into a cashless society means for us?

Are we waving goodbye to cash?

As we discussed, so many people are opting for cashless payments, although cash has been around for centuries, modern day technology makes it so much easier for people to just tap and go. At the moment we have no definite date on the uk becoming a cashless society but it could happen as early as 2026. Like anything there are pros and cons of becoming a society that no longer uses cash.

Will everyone be happy if we become a cashless society?

Statistics tell us that 2.2 billion people still use cash even though 1.3 million of them have access to bank accounts.Also we have the older generation who aren’t up to speed with modern day technology and prefer good old fashioned cash payments, other people will be affected in the long run too. This also reflects on the amount of bank branches we have seen closing in the past years , cash machines that people can access for free have also been disappearing up and down the country. A2Z recently carried out a survey and discovered that 20.5 million people in the UK still heavily rely on using cash.

Will it be cost effective?

The access cash report in the UK allows us to access information that tells us that currently infrastructure is rocky costing around 5 billion a year. A cashless infrastructure will be a lot less to run.

Climate friendly – Is it better?

Yes a cashless society will be better for the climate meaning less disruption vans, less machines & no more production of money.

Simplifying your journey

Going cashless means things will be easier for people when they’re out and about because it’s so easy to tap or swipe this means less time standing around and less face to face contact with people.

Tracking and management

Once you lose cash it’s usually gone. We cannot go back and find we’ve lost it or who has taken it, using cards and technology leaves that digital footprint and gives us a better chance of spotting any transactions that we haven’t made or if any money has disappeared we can trace it easily.

Should we hold on to our cash?

The simple answer is YES if you want to remain a society that uses cash we must make more effort to use it there are still positives to using cash it allows us to manage our money better , when we use cards it’s easy to tap tap tap and not realise what we are spending cash allows us to budget and only use what we need. Technology also has its faults and isn’t always reliable. We are at higher risk of technical failure or cyber attacks. I mean who could steal your identity from cash? Identify theft is rife as we have seen in recent years, also there is less chance of being scammed.