What will be the effects of becoming a cashless society? – words Alexa Wang
As contactless and debit and credit card spending rises, it’s led many experts to predict that we’re heading towards a cashless society.
Even now, the number of people who use cash to pay for goods has declined. However, could cash payments really become obsolete?
It does appear that a cashless society could well be on the cards. The question is, how would this affect society? Here, we’ll look at just some of the effects becoming a cashless society would have.
What would be the pros?
There’s no denying a cashless society would deliver numerous benefits. Firstly, it’s likely to reduce crime rates. As people wouldn’t be carrying around cash, thieves would be less likely to attempt to steal people’s belongings. While they could technically steal a card, they know you can just call your bank to cancel the card before they potentially even get an opportunity to spend on it.
There would also be no need to worry about currency exchange when you’re travelling. This isn’t just time consuming, it can also be really costly to exchange currency. While debit and credit cards could still incur some foreign use charges, it’s still much more convenient to carry a card around on holiday than it is to carry cash. Following on from the first benefit, it’s also safer to carry a card over cash when you’re abroad.
These are just a couple of benefits it could deliver. So, what about the downsides?
Potential cons of a cashless society
While there’s certainly some compelling benefits of becoming a cashless society, unfortunately there’s a lot of potential downsides too. When discussing this topic, it is imperative that we look at why a mixture of payment methods can benefits the customers financial security.
As all of our money would be stored and managed entirely online, there’s a huge risk your information could be breached. Hackers are continuously looking for ways to get their hands on people’s bank details. So, if there wasn’t any cash to steal, more would be looking at trying to break into online accounts.
There’s also the risk that technological errors could occur. If the system goes down, you have no way of getting to your money. You also wouldn’t have access to cash, so if the systems go down for a long time, it could potentially cause a lot of chaos and disruption.
Finally, if all of our spending was done via cards, it could lead to more problems with people not being able to manage their spending. If you can’t see the cash going out, it’s easy to spend more than you would if you were paying with cash. So, while it may seem convenient, a fully cashless society would definitely cause quite a few problems.
