Despite the hype surrounding mobile payments, the consumer love affair with notes and coins will continue unabated for at least another decade, with cash usage remaining on an upward curve in many developed and developing countries, according to a study by Market Platform Dynamics.
The study findings suggest that although payments innovation will eventually eat into consumers’ use of cash, significant impacts will take at least a decade to be felt.
Ten specific markets were examined in detail to calculate the growth or decline in cash over the next decade. The ten markets include the US, UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Turkey, Poland, Germany, and Italy. In all but one, Sweden, where the percentage of spending done in notes and coins by consumers is expected to decline, all study countries are projected to show an increase in total cash usage.
Even in places like Kenya and Japan and China and India where mobile phones are well-penetrated and innovations in national schemes like M-Pesa have gained traction, cash is used more than ever.
Says MPD CEO Karen Webster: "Cash has survived for thousands of years because it is an exceptional innovation – easy to use, almost all merchants accept it and people like it. But, it’s inevitable that as innovations around mobile and payments mature, the use of cash will be impacted – it will just take a lot longer than a lot of people would like you to believe."
The full technical paper, which includes a detailed discussion of the cash usage methodology and country cash usage projections, can be found here.
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