Cash out: the digital-payments revolution
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The global digital-payments shift is more than just a matter of convenience. We examine the cashlessness push in different economies and potential effects on different currencies. The Golden Mile, a pioneering multi-purpose architectural experiment in Singapore, is crumbling. We discuss efforts to spare it from the wrecking ball. And a reading list to learn about, and from, history’s greatest hoaxes.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Aure Oganbe. |
| 0:08.0 | And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:18.0 | After falling into disrepair, Singapore's historic age-defining Golden Mile Complex has been closed down for good. |
| 0:27.0 | Well, most of it anyway. Thanks to conservation advocates, all is not yet lost. |
| 0:35.0 | And a bit of foul trickery. Our correspondent recommends the books to read on history's most devious deceptions from Hitler's diaries to Instagram scams. |
| 0:45.0 | But first. |
| 0:56.0 | Not so long ago, we used to accept heavy coins weighing down our pockets and purses as just a fact of life. |
| 1:14.0 | The invention of debit cards and credit cards revolutionised the way we paid for things. |
| 1:19.0 | But cash still held on as a prime remains of payment. |
| 1:25.0 | The latest innovation in payment though is once and for all threatening to end the reign of paper and coin. |
| 1:32.0 | Digitization has completely changed the way that people make payments. So cash is no longer still king. |
| 1:39.0 | Arjun Romani is the economist's global business and economics correspondent. |
| 1:45.0 | Cash usage has fallen by around 25 percentage points across the world's major economies in the past decade, which is really remarkable. |
| 1:54.0 | So then how are people buying stuff? What's replacing cash? |
| 1:58.0 | Yeah, it really depends where you are in the world. So when you think of digital finance, a few things might come to mind. |
| 2:02.0 | You know, cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies. But what's really reducing cash usage is things that are more familiar. |
| 2:09.0 | Credit card penetration has increased all around the world. |
| 2:12.0 | Fintech apps of like PayPal or Venmo, their equivalents to those and other parts of the world that have grown quite a bit. |
| 2:18.0 | And basically smartphones have spread so much and everyone has an internet connection now. And so that's what's letting people pay digitally. |
| 2:25.0 | And so tell us more about how these different systems work in different countries and contexts. |
| 2:29.0 | There's a variety of different systems depending on where you are in the world. So if you start with the US or Europe, |
| 2:34.0 | it's primarily credit cards or debit cards that are connecting different people's bank counts. |
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