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BBC - Future - The surprising place where cash is going extinct

We’ve been in mobile payments from the earliest days. We worked on the UK’s first prepaid scheme, first WAP “walled garden”, first NFC trials and, I’m proud to say, M-PESA in Kenya. Success has many fathers, of course, but carrying out the original feasibility study for M-PESA is one of the bigger feathers in the CHYP cap. We also work for customers all around the world (I mean it: in the last year we have consultants working in China, India, the Americas, Australia, the Far East. Leeds, even. We have a pretty realistic picture of what is happening at the forefront of the payments industry. Hence it was no surprise to us to read that:

Payments through mobile she says have rocketed from 5% two years ago to more than 40% now.

From BBC - Future - The surprising place where cash is going extinct

Yes, the BBC points to Somaliland rather than powered-by-Swish Sweden as the place where cash will first vanish into memory. And if your memory is good, you may recall that you read it all here first, five years ago.

Somaliland might well become the world’s first cashless country. Not Iceland or the Netherlands, Korea or Kenya, but Somaliland

From The world’s first cashless country | Consult Hyperion

As I have often said at conferences, in seminars and when interviewed, it is the mobile phone (not the payment card) that is the nail in cash’s coffin, because a mobile phone is a means to get paid as well as a means to pay. It’s both a “card” and "a terminal" in the world of Visa and PayPal, Faster Payments and Venmo.

If you go to China or Kenya, you’ll see people paying with phones. In fact when I was in China last month, I was in a near-permanent state of shock watching people for everything, everywhere with ubiquitous bar codes. And almost all of those payments went through third-party providers (WeChat and AliPay) rather than through bank services.

So why don’t we pay for everything using our mobile phones in the UK? Or USA? 

New interfaces (voice), new security (face), new authentication techniques (continuous passive authentication)

It’s more security, but more convenience that wins out.

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