Cashless society, negative interest rates and hyperinflation – part 2
By BullionStar
GoldSeek.com
Monday, 25 June 2018
Imagine a country in which banks hold virtually no cash at all. A country where if you walk into a bank branch, the clerk won’t be able to help you make a deposit. A country where there’s a good chance that if you grabbed a wad of cash and walked into an electronics store or a major nightclub, they wouldn’t be able to assist you in buying a new computer, nor get your drink on.
Welcome to Sweden, the land of virtual cashlessness! Although the Swedish Riksbank recently launched a full array of new and very colorful bills featuring celebrities such as famous children’s book author Astrid Lindgren and film director Ingmar Bergman, cash usage in Sweden is in absolute freefall, down from SEK 100 billion in 2010 to SEK 70 billion in 2015. Several factors combined has led to this development.
Since many years, most Swedes above age 16 use a VISA, Master or Maestro debit card to settle payments, even for smaller sums below $10.
Sweden is, and has for many years been, in the forefront in both developing and adapting new IT technology and early became one of the most mobile phone dense countries in the world, with upwards of 60% of the Swedish population owning a mobile phone as early as 1999.
The Swedes willingness to adapt new technology is evident from the proliferation of a transfer system called ‘SWISH’. The SWISH app enables any two parties holding a Swedish bank account and a Swedish phone number to transfer money to each other instantly, with no fees. Even merchants use SWISH to accept payments. There are homeless people selling newspapers accepting payment via SWISH. In Stockholm, these homeless sellers have even been accepting credit card payments since as early as 2013 using a smartphone extension known as ‘iZettle’, also invented in Stockholm Sweden.
During the last few years, more than 70% of all bank branches in Sweden has gone cashless, meaning that if you walk into a bank branch in Sweden, there’s about a 70% chance (or even higher) they won’t accept any cash you try to deposit.
There are virtually no payments being made by cheques anylonger in Sweden as banks stopped issuing cheque books years ago.
Tech loving Swedes
Some of the facts listed might sound unbelievable and even absurd for someone not living in Sweden: No cash in the bank? Homeless people accepting credit card payments?
Yes, the Swedes seem extremely willing to accept new cashless payment technologies, such as credit/debit cards as well as payment apps, and forgo old ones, such as cash and cheques. All with little or no suspicion towards these new electronic payment methods.
Other countries have tried the same. Singapore tried, or at least planned to try a new electronic cash system named SELT or ‘Singapore Electronic Legal Tender’. In an OECD report issued in 2002, the Board of Commissioners of Currency (which was the sole currency issuing agency preceding the merger with MAS in 2002) outlined the envisioned structure of the SELT system where the goal was said to be reducing physical cash usage and its handling costs.
As can be read from the 2002 OECD report, the SELT system was in a very early conceptual stage and only outlined in very broad strokes. Interesting to note is that as early as 1998 the BCCS held a strategic planning seminar in which it set as its ‘corporate vision’ the introduction of SELT within 10 years.
The 2002 report further states that the SELT system was to be put in place in order to effectivize the cash currency system. The SELT system never came to fruition, and as is evident from the statistics displayed further down in this article, the amount of cash currency circulating in Singapore has increased immensely since 2002. As have the amount of cash ATM machines, where there were way less than 2000 units back then. The OECD report also mentions that although cash transaction costs in Singapore are extremely low, the cost to the economy was approximately SGD 656 million in 1998 and was projected to exceed SGD 1 billion by 2006.
The BCCS envisioning a system such as SELT 15 years ago shows they were ahead of their times and that Singapore government institutions are very early in trying to adopt new technologies and are eager to make their government institutions more effective to have a positive impact on the market economy of the nation. This goes in line with the Smart Nation Objectives that Singapore has outlined. In contrast to Sweden, the Singaporean approach have been to adapt new payment methods such as e.g. card payments, while still being extremely welcoming to older payment modes such as cash or even cheques. The very safe environment with extremely low violent crime rates makes Singapore a nation that lends itself well to cash payments.
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