More people are willing to throw away their wallets full of cash and trade them for a slimmer wallet full of credit cards and other forms of electronic payment.
The world is edging toward cashless. More people are open to the idea of a completely cashless system. There are already those who are practically living in a cashless system, according to the way they choose to make purchases every day.
Ian Bright, ING senior economist, spoke about the state of all things cashless, “In my own thoughts, we’ll never go completely cashless, but more and more people will end up in a situation where they can quite comfortably get by for two days, three days, four days, and even a week, without ever using cash. And certainly that’s what we found. We asked people, if you were in a situation where you couldn’t access cash, ATMs just weren’t available or something, how long do you think you’d get by? Around about one in three said, we’d get by around about 72 hours. Around about 50 percent said we can get by for a week. Then we said what about a month, only around about 20 percent said we’d get there. But already people are organising their lives in a way that they don’t necessarily have to have cash on them.”
An ING survey found that more than a third of Americans and Europeans would be ready for a cashless society.
Out of the countries surveyed, Germans were most hesitant to give up cash habits. Only 10 percent said they rarely use cash compared with higher percentages in most other countries.
