Wandered into a hipster coffee bar or eatery lately? The Yoghurt and WiFi may be fat-free, but one
more “free” development is creeping up on us.
These establishments are increasingly Cash-free. It’s a Card-only payment zone – take your jar
of pennies elsewhere please. Is this the
real-world starting to mirror the online world or is something more sinister afoot?
Consider whose convenience this is really for. For a start, let’s examine the practicalities
of a retailer accepting cash. Cash is
more open to theft & fraud, it’s more open to mistakes, and it requires the
merchant to store enough change to give back to the customer. These cash-based transactions also take
longer to process. So where businesses like
these hipster cafes have high transaction rates, it makes sense for them to go
cashless. This is already spreading to
the likes of fast food outlets where they politely ask the customer to prepay
their food on a big screen on entry to the premises. The staff’s role is to merely hand over the
bag of semi-cooked goodies.
Another example of the cost of cash is in parking. A UK-based national car parking company based
around tube stations now charges more for a cash transaction than for a card
transaction. Parking companies have
figured out that accepting cash and adapting to newly minted coins is an
expensive machine upgrade which card payments obviate.
Some people are taking action against this decline of Cash. They are trying to learn lessons from the
experience in Sweden, where the decline of cash acceptance has been more rapid
than the punters were expecting. One of
those, Natalie Ceeney, chairwoman of the Access
to Cash Review has taken on the unenviable task of trying to slow down this
decline of cash because as she points
out there is still a sizeable portion of the population who do not use banking services
but instead rely on cash entirely to budget and manage their household spend. And it’s not a divide based on age but rather
more based on levels of poverty or income.
Unsurprisingly the issue is more acute in rural areas than in the towns
and cities, so we may see cash hanging on longer in rural locations than in the
more built-up parts of our communities.
The decline of the retail banking system is not helping. On
the cash supply side, Bank branches are closing with more ATMs going into Post
Offices, supermarkets and retail shopping malls. So access to cash in some
rural locations is also becoming more of a challenge.
We can’t hold back progress, so whichever way this goes, OmniPayments
is ready to help consumers both withdraw & spend their money in ways that they
choose. If you accept card payments,
need to operate a modern payments switch, or have customers needing access to
Cash, OmniPayments remains the most flexible solution in the payments market.
JCPenney realised the wisdom of choosing OmniPayments as their
card payments solution to integrate their clicks and bricks business. We featured
their decision a couple months back (see https://omnipayments.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-did-jcpenney-manage-their-migration.html) It’s the most authentic case study you’ll
ever read.
See us at the LATUG in Bogota, Colombia on May 2-3 and ETBC in
Edinburgh, Scotland May 14-15.
For further information Contact us at Sales@omniPayments.com or visit our
website at www.omnipayments.com
This article also appeared in Tandemworld April
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