How do you feel about a cashless society?
If Wednesday’s Optus outage taught us anything, it’s that we already rely on technology so much in our every day lives and when the system crashes, it affects us in many ways.
Listen to today’s episode of The Briefing here:
In Australia, only 16 per cent of transactions made in 2022 were completed with cash, with bank notes more and more being taken out of circulation.
There is one country that’s essentially turned cashless, and that’s Sweden.
In 2022, only eight per cent of business transactions made with cash.
On today’s episode of The Briefing, Katrina Blowers is joined by Dr Claire Ingram Bogusz from the Stockholm School of Economics to find out what a future cashless Australia might look like.
Dr Bogusz described the technology used in Sweden called Swish, which is a peer-to-peer transaction system.
She said it has worked “incredibly well” but there has been some hiccups and porblems along the way.
“Occasionally the banks go down, or that is to say the payment infrastructure, there’s some sort of technical glitch,” she said.
“So, there has been and regularly are instances where it’s just not possible to pay with your bank card.
“The continued move to cash looseness, marginalises people who are not digitally literate, so particularly the elderly.”