In 2015, Tim Cook stated that the next generation of children “will not know what money is.” It was at a meeting with students at Trinity College, Dublin, and, obviously, the CEO of Apple meant not all money but exclusively cash.
Visa has just launched a social initiative aiming at financially rewarding business who accept to help win Visa’s war on cash with a 10-000-dollar check. At stake: completing the transformation of economies with the deletion of physical currency and making all payments digital and tappable. But despite rather valid arguments on the purely financial aspect of the shift, civil liberties activists warn that the toll on individual liberties would be devastatingly high.
On January 23rd of this year, the EU Commission issued the ‘Commission Initiative Roadmap’ for 2018 regarding the reinforced fight against the financing of terrorism. These measures happen to be in fact restriction on payments made in cash. In other words, the Initiative is not so much about fighting terrorism but more a war declaration to cash money. The EU wants to become cashless but Europeans disagree and the Initiative has made Europe loose more of the little credibility it had left.
After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the coasts of Japan, one of the most important difficulties faced by the survivors was to buy their daily groceries. Most of them had left with their credit cards and phones but those proved to be useless in a post-disaster society. A few weeks after the tragedy, an old man was asked what he would have done differently to prepare from the evacuation “I wished I had packed a decent pair of shoes, my toothbrush … and some cash” he said. Here is why a cashless society can put us all in that same situation.
‘Do you trust cash as a mean of payment?’ Most of us have never asked ourselves this question as cash is deeply rooted in our daily lives; sometimes we use it without even noticing. Yet, behind all of our coins and banknotes there is a world of professionals who work to keep cash secure and accessible to all of us. Many of these professionals met in Paris in April to discuss the future of cash. If you believed that your banknotes were slowly disappearing, you are probably mistaken.
