COVID-19 shouldn't kill cash!

Various studies have shown that paying for something with a credit card is less painful for people than paying with cash. It is easier to say goodbye to something intangible.

Digital payment systems encourage people to spend more with less forethought. This favours the merchant, not the consumer. It has never been easier to separate people from their funds - while telling them that their lives are getting easier.

The bulkiness of cash, often cited as a downside, is actually one of its USPs. It has weight and substance, which means we can readily see when our supply is running low. Digital coinage is a collection of 1s and 0s that most of us don't understand and certainly can't see.

ID Theft

According to a 2019 report by Cifas, a leading fraud prevention service, identity theft has become a national epidemic. In 2018, 190,000 cases of identity fraud were reported in the UK. This represents an increase of 8% from the previous year. Most cases involved victims under the age of 21 and over the age of sixty. (https://www.fool.co.uk/mywallethero/your-money/learn/identity-theft-in-the-uk-how-bad-is-it/)

Plastic cards are the most targeted products for identity fraud. In 2018 alone, there was a total of 82,608 cases – an increase of 41% from 2017. It won't be long, surely, before mobile digital platforms take over this mantle.

A thief can steal your cash without gaining any advantage in terms of personal information about you. That's certainly not true of most forms of digital payment. If we continue to push toward a completely cashless economy, identify theft will become an even greater concern.

Digital Dementia

Cashless payment systems rely on our engagement with digital technologies. Yet studies suggest that there are serious questions to answer about the impacts of these technologies on our cognition and productivity.

Some of these studies talk about the emergence of Digital Dementia.

Until very recently, dementia was thought to become apparent only in people over the age of sixty-five. However, the results of a ten-year research project released a few years ago challenged that thinking. It found that the onset of dementia commonly occurs in people as young as forty-five.

I wonder whether another decadal study, launched today, would find that what we called dementia in 2020 became the normal state of mind in 2030? And would it attribute such marks of decline as spatial confusion, problems with numbers and shrinking vocabularies - all symptoms of dementia in today's terms - to an over-reliance on machines?