Member-only story
I wrote this article with Al Dingwall, former senior editor at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). It was first published on ADB’s website on 15 July 2020.
As a result of the pandemic, fewer people are using cash and more have moved to a variety of digital payment options. But don’t count cash out yet.
Banknotes and coins have been very visible casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in India, where cash is still king, ATM use dropped by about half in April. Since the pandemic began, nearly half (46%) of respondents in Asia and the Pacific say they are using cash less often according to a Mastercard survey, a trend that has been replicated throughout the world.
The pandemic has proved to be a trigger event accelerating an already inexorable trend. Cash was used for 87% of payments in the United Kingdom in 1985, but for only 23% in 2019. In urban parts of the People’s Republic of China, use of the two most popular payment services, Alipay and WeChat Pay, was already rocketing before the virus struck. A 2018 study found that 98% of people with smartphones in cities used their devices for mobile payments.
Non-cash payments are still dominated by credit and debit cards issued by banks and other large financial institutions, but there are plenty of disrupter technologies looking to challenge the dominance of Visa (849 million cardholders…
