My son and I have been out and about, living the life of normal folk who don’t care about payments. We made a couple of cash payments and we made a couple of non-cash payments. We didn’t, however, make any chip and PIN or contactless or swipe payments.
The Halifax, part of the Lloyds Banking Group, just released some interesting figures about trends in customer use of payments. One of the more noticeable trends is the steady fall in the use of cash, a fact that was picked up on by a a number of news outlets.
“Cash withdrawals now account for just £18.33 of every £100 spent, a £1.82 decline since 2013.”
This got me on to BBC Wake Up To Money and subsequently a number of other BBC Radio interviews about the rise of electronic payments and the decline of cash. One of the questions I was asked was about places where you have to use cash. I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head. I was thinking of using the example of giving money to beggar in the street (which I never do, I but I’ve heard of the phenomenon), but then I remembered that beggars are ahead of this particular curve.
I think this is pretty forward-thinking of him, and despite the underhand nature of his enterprise, applaud his willingness to try exciting new forms of payments at the heart of Europe’s FinTech capital.
If you want to donate to another worthy cause, the Dave Birch Holiday Home in the South of France Emergency Appeal, you can PingIt the money to @dgwbirch and I will, of course, be only to happy to e-mail you a receipt on request. But back to the point. Where do you have to use cash? On one of the shows (I apologise for forgetting which one) someone said that they had to pay cash at they local Chinese restaurant. This made me wonder: why do people go to cash-only restaurants? Apparently I’m not the only person that thinks about this.
Yeah, well. I don’t buy the hipster curve on this. If I am out for lunch and I see a restaurant with “cash only” in big letters on the door then I will walk straight past it. The only reason that I’ll go in is because they don’t tell you they are cash-only until it is too late. I have the same problem with taxis. I suddenly decide to hail a black because I’m in a street full of them and so can’t be bothered to use Hailo or Uber or whatever. So I put my arm out, the cab stops, I jump in and… I see a sign saying “cash only”.
At that point I should of course tell the driver to stop and let me out, but because I’m English I find it very difficult to do that and so instead sit fuming in the back until we approach my destination and then jump out to run to an ATM. It looks as if some other drivers recognise and anticipate that problem too, because it’s presumably a problem for them that the machines often have only £10 and £20 notes in them.
In a modern city such as London, this is unacceptable. Either ban taxis from cash-only operation or make them paint the cash-only taxis a different colour so that normal law-abiding citizens can avoid hailing them. Anyway: it’s a minor point. Hailo, Uber and whatever mean that none of us will be hailing taxis for very much longer and #appandpay will again triumph over #tapandpay. Meanwhile, still scratching my head about where I might last have used cash, I remembered my day out in Woking last week. I picked up my son from his friend’s house, where he regaled me with (quite unprompted) tales of his night out at Wagamama in Camberley, where he tried out their nearly new QKR! implementation. He loved it, and thought that the #appandpay convenience of the service was an absolute winner. Why wait for a server to come over to the table with a chip and PIN machine when you can just pay via the app and go?
He was telling me this as we were strolling down to check out Woking’s newest wargamesshop, the excellent “ibuywargames”. Having had a look around and decided to buy a couple of things, I noticed a PayPal chip and PIN reader in the store. I took this to mean that they would accept all forms of PayPal so, since I had my phone in my hand but my cards were in my wallet, we both fired up PayPal and I paid in-app. Another #appandpay triumph, but this time over #chipandpay. So, no need for cash there either.
But then I remembered: I did use cash after all that day. We stopped for a burrito at the truly fabulous Aracelis stall in the old Woking market. I was lured there by my son’s tales of their fantastic Mexican food. I am sorry to report that when I got there I found that they were cash-only, so I was about to walk away on principle but my son forced me to suppress my conscience and order. It was amazing. All they need is a contactless reader and I might never leave.
The point here is that one of the key reasons why cash is in decline for retail transactions (as I mentioned on several radio stations) is the rise of the mobile phone as a alternative not only to the card but also to the terminal. As has been observed here many times before, it is the mobile phone (rather than the plastic card) that it is leading down the road to cashlessness, and this is the point I wanted to reinforce. Oh, and that half of the payment experiences I’ve spoken about here were in-app.
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
