| Physical cash is on the way out. People have been saying that for a long time, but one catastrophe after another with the alternatives reminds us that sometimes having a simple, reliable, anonymous means of paying for things isn't such a bad idea after all. I'm in the UK. A major bank here has just spectacularly screwed up a migration to a new IT system, and for several weeks many people and businesses have been unable to use the most basic and essential facilities. Just this past week, Visa had a major outage and people were unable to buy food in shops or fill up their vehicles. While those were particularly bad instances of things going wrong, it's not as if we couldn't find many more examples going further back as well. Obviously cash has its own downsides, particularly around counterfeit currency and the costs of handling and securing it. There is no perfect solution to making payments. But I suspect predictions of an entirely cashless society are still a long way from becoming reality for most of us. You can do payments through mastercard/visa lines, and wired transfers are straightforward. That very much depends on where you are and where the business or person you want to pay is. In some places, electronic transfers are quick and easy. In some parts of the world, they are expensive, slow, and rely on technology that feels like it came from another era. The major card networks are the single biggest blight on the payment landscape, because they suck in almost every conceivable way except for being so widely established, but that last point means disrupting them is a very tall order. FX conversions are straightforward when everyone has a phone. But many people won't bother to do that conversion. If you're advertising prices in your native currency and your customer has a different currency, that can be a huge barrier to conversion. Most people don't know or care even roughly how much of their local currency equals the advertised price in yours. This effect is at least moderated if you're advertising in a very big currency that some people have encountered before, which basically means the US dollar or Euro if you're in the West. |