Community

To paraphrase Al Capone (a former Mafia Don), you can get a lot more done with cash and cashless than with cashless alone. 

Since I'm a payments tech professional, I have a vested interest in the growth of cashless / lesscash. However, IMO, silly, reality-defying and headline-bait posts like this are the enemy in the drive to achieve that outcome. I've shared some alternatives in How To Really Kill Cash.  

@DavidGodfrey: I don't know the exact figures but I can bet that the amount lost to criminal activity associated with electronic payments is 10X more than that associated with cash. If SWIFT is not an MOP, neither is cash - as someone who lived in India in November 2016, I only know too well how suddenly sovereign guarantees can be revoked. Besides, the point is moot: The PNB scam involved no cash and that's the real point - fraud can happen with any way you pay and not just when you pay with cash.

The currently unraveling $1.8B fraud at India's Punjab National Bank happened entirely via SWIFT, the mother of all electronic payment methods.

Congratulations Australia, only 8 years later and 950 million dollars costlier than India. 

In an era where banks have been fined billions for enabling money laundering via EFT, and cryptocurrencies facilitate crime totally electronically - blaming cash for crime is totally reality-defying. 

Perfect use case for Blockchain. Not because Centralized Escrow Apps are broken. But because Blockchain dApps can deliver lower operating costs. Just as in the case of Flight Delay Insurance.

@AlexKreger:

This disruption thingy is not new. It has been talked about for the past several years. However, it hasn't come anywhere close to happening. Traditional finserv continues to be the most profitable industry in FORTUNE 500. Actually, what has happened in reality is, those who chanted the disruption mantra have changed their tune and have started chanting the partnership mantra for the last 2-3 years. Against that backdrop, the claim that time will put anything in place is totally disconnected from ground realities and is something that Finextra Readers are only too aware of, which is what I want to insistently (sic) prove.

If only people switched from Google to any one of half a dozen other search engines with the click of a mouse, Google wouldn't be facing (IMO unfair) charges of monopoly. Against that backdrop of actual consumer behavior in a product category where switching providers is totally frictionless, the claim "changing banks is a click away" utterly defies reality. ICYMI, according to the old adage, "Switching banks is more painful than root canal surgery".

What "age of disruption"? Have you missed all the news of how Moven, Dwolla and dozens of other wannabe-bank disruptors realized that it's virtually impossible for startups to disrupt banks and changed their tune to fintech-bank partnership 2-3 years ago??

According to a recent Cornerstone Advisors study, (a) Millennials show as much preference for MegaBanks as other generations (b) Digital Banks have only 1% market share (c) Megabanks have digital technology that works (d) And just because something comes from a fintech startup, that doesn't mean it works, or is better than what's already out there.

Sorry but your article is many years too late.

Sounds more like riffraff. GiffGaff is trying to do stuff which PFMs and MoMMAs have been trying to do for ages without much consumer adoption. GiffGaff should first make telephone statements simple before venturing into bank account statements. Innovative Fintechs Don’t Need No PSD2 Regulation