Has Covid accelerated the cashless society?

Time is, I fear, running out. Running out, that is, to avoid handing to a small number of multinational corporations our right to buy and sell things. Running out to prevent governments and central banks helping themselves to our savings, by means of negative interest rates. The payments industry is closing in on its target of driving cash out of circulation and instigating cashless payments as the only way of doing business.

That, at least, is the conclusion one might reach from reading a report by Worldpay: the Global Payments Report 2021. It claims that cash payments in UK shops in 2020 made up 13.4 per cent of total payments, down from 27.4 per cent in 2019. By 2024, it predicts, they will be down to just 6.9 per cent. By the same year it will be down to just 0.4 per cent in Sweden.

‘The sun is setting on cash’ it blurts out in corporate PR speech, going on to repeat the claim made regularly over the past year by the cashless lobby, suggesting that using cash is somehow not safe:

We would face a future in which central banks could attempt to control the economy by means of negative interest rates

‘Consumer perceptions about safety persist: 53 per cent of global consumers surveyed by Worldpay said coronavirus made them more hesitant to use cash.’