The Cashless Economy

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Once Ronald Reagan have said: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it will certainly get you a better class of memories.” Even though in today’s society there is many various definitions for the concept “money”, generally it is accepted as a medium of exchange – something that people use to pay for goods and services, the main reason why mostly people go to work – and also has the functions as a unit of account and as a store of value. Sadly, but common people are not interested in money’s functions, all they think of when heard word “money” is paper notes and metal coins that are likely to be eliminated in the near future! As technologies are improving rapidly, more and more countries in Asia and Europe starts preaching cashless economy.
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To prompt this transformation go faster, South Korea is about to completely eliminate metal coins from the market till 2020 and keep only paper money. There are already a few countries in Asia such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam where citizens use nothing else but paper money. This shows that cashless economy is slowly gaining ground worldwide in this century: since most of money now are held by mobile phones, this leads to bank’s branches closing, also ATMs are predicted to disappear. However, one of the articles in British newspaper’s “Business Standard” April 16th issue points out that the idea of going cashless is driven not by central banks or governments. The ones that are getting the biggest benefit are commercial banks and payment service providers, and the reason they are doing this is because “they have an interest in shrinking the market share for cash and are promoting themselves aggressively.” Back in the past there was a time period when credit cards were considered as evil when people experienced the credit crisis in the early 2000s so people were not so interested in using them. Even there is still some trust issues to use cards or any electronic technologies for larger payments in South Korea, today’s society is making a large progress - credit cards continuously transform along with the growing trend toward electronic money as most banks and card companies keep their eyes on mobile payments services. And this concept is confirmed by statistics that shows that almost 80 percent payments in South Korea today are made by using electronic

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