In the main the prospect of a cashless economy is excellent news. Cash is inefficient. In rich countries, minting, sorting, storing and distributing it is estimated to cost about 0.5% of GDP. But that does not begin to capture the gains. When payments dematerialise, people and shops are less vulnerable to theft. Governments can keep closer tabs on fraud or tax evasion. Digitalisation vastly expands the playground of small businesses and sole traders by enabling them to sell beyond their borders. It also creates a credit history, helping consumers borrow.
Yet set against these benefits are a bundle of worries. Electronic payment systems may be vulnerable to technical failures, power blackouts and cyber-attacks—this week Capital One, an American bank, became the latest firm to be hacked. In a cashless economy the poor, the elderly and country folk may be left behind. And eradicating cash, an anonymous payment method, for a digital system could let governments snoop on people’s shopping habits and private titans exploit their personal data.
These problems have three remedies. First, governments need to ensure that central banks’ monopoly over coins and notes is not replaced by private monopolies over digital money. Rather than letting a few credit-card firms have a stranglehold on the electronic pipes for digital payments, as America may yet allow, governments must ensure the payments plumbing is open to a range of digital firms which can build services on top of it. They should urge banks to offer cheap, instant, bank-to-bank digital transfers between deposit accounts, as in Sweden and the Netherlands. Competition should keep prices low so that the poor can afford most services, and it should also mean that if one firm stumbles others can step in, making the system resilient.
Second, governments should maintain banks’ obligation to keep customer information private, so that the plumbing remains anonymous. Digital firms that use this plumbing to offer services should be free to monetise transaction data, through, for example, advertising, so long as their business model is made explicit to users. Some customers will favour free services that track their purchases; others will want to pay to be left alone.