Pi-Consulting

The financial industries have good reason to wean us all off cash, and to push credit cards and other forms of non-specie payment. It saves them …well, money. The minting, counting and administering of banknotes and coinage rises in cost every year. By contrast, the progressive switch to plastic and other digitally-denominated forms of payment is relentlessly driven by Moore’s Law, which cuts the cost of computer processing power approximately by half every eighteen months. Result: ever-cheaper digital transactions. The European Union estimates a saving of 50 billion Euros ($65 billion US) per year if cash were to vanish overnight. Visa and MasterCard are doing their bit by introducing plastic cards for paying bills under $25, which require neither a customer signature nor a PIN number. Now mobile phones are becoming a payment method. A few hundred thousand Japanese already pay for groceries, cinema tickets and rail travel by passing their telephone handsets over a “phone-reader” and waiting for the endearingly old-fashioned “ka-ching” noise that signals a successful payment. The death of cash? Not so fast, friends, keep a hold on your billfolds. Electronic money movements can be monitored, and the anonymity of folding-money will always remain popular with those of us who don’t want to leave a digital trail revealing our transactions to prying eyes. Source: The Economist, Pi.