[roenxi]

And what if a business gets cut off? Or the local internet/cell tower system goes down for 24 hours? I have a local grocers near me where the card scanning machine sometimes breaks. The centralised cashless system is great when it works but it has a lot of complicated parts that require time and specialist knowledge to fix.

It would be royally foolish to phase out cash for small transactions. The option needs to be there.

[fyfy18]

Card payments, including contactless payments, can be done offline. However the card has to be configured by the bank to allow this, which I guess some do not.

[PeterisP]

It's a very specific notion of "done" - you can record an offline authorization event; so the customer-visible part is done, but the actual payment is not.

The merchant is not going to have any access to that money whatsoever until/unless connectivity is restored. They can't pay their suppliers or employees with that money while they're offline.

It's pretty much the digital equivalent of scribbling "Bob authorised to pay me $12.34" on a notebook that you're going to bring to the bank afterwards.

[fyfy18]

Even if the transaction is online, you don't see the money in your bank account straight away. It takes a few days for card payments to settle, and usually the payment processor will have a predefined schedule as to when you get paid. The context of my comment was on the payment terminal being offline for a day or two.

[tastroder]

Emphasis on "can". The system at the point of sale that processes the card has to support that as well, quite a few of them don't and rely on some sort of centralized infrastructure to function, at least around here in Germany.