It’s been a long time we heard about the concept of “cashless society”, which means more and more usage of digital and mobile payment modes than cash transactions. Interestingly, there is a new prediction from PayPal, which confirms its expected arrival and forecasts that there would be no wallets required in UK by 2016.
The Financial giant, PayPal, has conducted a survey report titled as “Money: the digital tipping point”. In this new report, which is scheduled to release shortly, Paypal predicts that the customers would neither need cash, nor their wallet for shopping in the near future.
If we see around us, many people prefer to shop via credit/debit cards, especially in developed countries of Europe and U.S. But this trend would also get heavily affected in near future when the smartphones will be loaded with all your financial details and mobile payment technology. Although for this, you will have to have an NFC enabled smartphone for payments, which is widely used in Japan these days but not in many countries around the world. Recently, Google has also introduced its Google Wallet service that transform your mobile phone into wallet. But there are now chances that alternative for NFC technology will soon be introduced, may be in the form of web application or something.
Paypal expects to see this vision happening in 2016. However, the question arising here is whether there will be any cash transactions in future or will the cash (as in notes/bills) completely be wiped out?
According to a survey, 45 Million people in the UK use a mobile phone, of those 49% mobile users who were surveyed, used their device to purchase products once every three months. Paypal has currently 14 Million active accounts in UK, and over a million of them have already sent a mobile payment. This year PayPal is expected to process the mobile payments of more than $3.5 Billion, this is almost five times more than it processed last year.
As evident from above figures and survey report, mobile payment technology will increase significantly over the next few years. Its just we will have to see If Cash comes under the threat of NFC and mobile payment technologies OR still remain the basic payment mode in the trading world.
Let us know in the comments what do you see happening in 2016 ?
