The Importance of Life Buoys

A recent blog by Sam Bobeov and Fintech Wrap on Payment : Unpacked asked who gets left behind in a cashless world ¹.

It started with an interesting chart from GlobalData showing the decline of cash transactions by volume between 2020 and 2023 with six emerging markets and six advanced economies. It isn’t always easy to second guess which countries will have had the biggest change.

India’s Unified Payment Infrastructure (UPI), which launched in 2016, processed 7.82 billion transactions in December 2022.

Pix has become the most used payment system in Brazil in just two years. UPI and Pix are used for business-to-consumer (B2C) and person-to-person (P2P) payments. No surprise, therefore, about the rate of change for those countries.

On the other hand, Mexico and Indonesia have good payment infrastructure but cash has hardly moved. Malaysia sits in between. Meanwhile, in the advanced economies the decline of cash has already happened, and so further reductions are relatively small.