Tag Archives: cashlessness

Cashless as Count Zero

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As I wrote recently, China is well on the way to becoming a cashless society. It is not the only country heading in that direction, of course. A cursory examination of the global statistics around the declining use of banknotes and coins make it easy to predict that many countries will soon be effectively cashless within the strategic horizon of corporate planners. But what does this actually? USA Today jut asked what sounded like a pretty dumb question: will there be cash in a cashless society? Well, I don’t think it’s dumb question. And the answer is “yes”. When I talk about a cashless society within a generation, I do not mean that there will be literally no cash at all. That would be stupid. When I say cashless, I mean cashless in the Count Zero sense.

Cash will still be around and it will still be legal tender (although I don’t think people understand what a limited concept this is), but it will disappear from polite society and from the daily lives of most people. We will move from being a debit card society to a mobile society to a biometric society in which cash will still exist. It it just won’t matter. As the brilliant William Gibson wrote in his 1995 classic novel Count Zero, talking about a character adrift in the near future that “he had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that” going to deliver my favourite line about cash in the whole of modern fiction: “It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it”.

Psst

with kind permission of TheOfficeMuse (CC-BY-ND 4.0)

Why am I focusing on this vision? Well, as my friend and top futurist Ross Dawson points out about Gibson, has never claimed to predict the future [but he] has “an unmatched knack for analyzing trends and behaviors inherent to modern life and extrapolating them into vivid themes that reveal a kind of raw truth about humanity”. He has an amazing track record on this, by the way. As the New Yorker highlights, Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981 and his books, I have to admit, had a huge impact on me and my way of thinking about technology.

Thus by cashless in the Count Zero sense, I mean that cash has ceased to be relevant to monetary policy, become irrelevant to most individuals and vanished from most businesses. As we look to the future, we can begin to ask, quite reasonably, whether developments in digital payment technology and changes in payments and banking regulation will bring us to the point of this kind of cashlessness within, say, a generation. Well, never mind a generation, we’re pretty close to it now as far as I can see. Let’s just say that if you live in Amsterdam, you don’t need cash for the trains and if you live in London you don’t need cash for the coffee shops. No-one is planning or managing this, it’s just happening.

Is this what we want though? This is a form of cashlessness that is too conservative to reap the benefits of a truly cashless economy, too disorganised to reign in the criminal exploitation of cash and too wedded to the symbolism of physical money to switch it off (just as we switched off analogue TV not that long ago). I think that rump cash (and I exclude various categories of post-functional cash from this definition) should be actively managed out of existence.

We need to have a strategy toward cashlessness, and not simply a laissez-faire acceptance that cashlessness will happen to the great benefit of the majority but in a way that excludes and marginalises some. Click To Tweet

A recent survey in the UK found that over 75% of low-income households rely on cash, as well as over 80% of elderly households. The shift to cashless society must be planned to help these groups so that they share in the benefits of cashlessness. Having been to China and seen at first hand the operation of a cashless society, I think it obvious that we should learn from their experiences, beginning with the observation that people in China are well aware of what happens to when society switches from anonymous cash to electronic payments. As observed in the Financial Times, the “scale of data accumulation is beyond our imagination”. The Chinese woman making that comment — while at the same time observing that despite her concerns about privacy, mobile payments are too convenient to opt out of — goes on to say, rather poetically, that she cannot tell whether her compatriots are “constructing a futurist society or a cage for ourselves”

Not everyone in China is part of this digital currency revolution, of course. The World Bank Global Findex database, which measures financial inclusion, estimates that as of lat year some some 200 million Chinese rural citizens remain unbanked, or outside of the formal financial system. As in Sweden, the shift toward cashless is raising issues around exclusion and marginalisation. There are, for example, supermarkets with different lanes for cash or cashless payments that act as physical manifestation of social stratification between, as Foreign Policy notes, the young and the old and between the urban middle class and those left behind. I’ve written before that we will see the same in developed economies as cash vanishes from middle class life to become the preserve of the rich and the poor who will use it for tax evasion and budgeting respectively.

The response should not be, as in some American cities, to force people to continue to use cash despite the expense, inefficiency and inconvenience, but to find effective digital alternatives for those trapped in a cash economy. I think we should start to plan for this now. I am in favour of Count Zero cashlessness, but I am in favour of it as a policy decision by society that is implemented to meet society’s goals. I couldn’t disagree more with the Wall Street Journal’s view that the move to cashless society “should be left to technological advancement”. No, it should not! This is a matter of great importance and with significant implications for society. The strategy should therefore be set by society, not by technologists.

Now, clearly, technological advances deliver new possibilities to policymakers and it is good for technologists to explore these possibilities. But, as they say, just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. We need a proper debate and a regulatory envelope set out to move forward so that anyone who needs to pay for anything will be able to do so electronically and that anyone who does not want to pay electronically will be presented with a method for paying in cash, albeit one that someone will have to pay for. It’s time to start thinking about what the requirements for that infrastructure are and consulting consumer organisations, businesses and government departments on their needs. We need to make a cashless Britain, not simply allow a cashless Britain.

[An edited version of this piece first appeared in Forbes, 18th August 2020.]

Margaret Attwood, Kenneth Rogoff and William Gibson (and me)

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A few years ago I was involved in a series of Twitter exchanges about the relationship between cash and anonymity that stimulated me to write a blog post on that topic and that debate (see “It doesn’t have to be the handmaid’s tale” from September 2016). Some more recent exchanges on the same topic made me think about revisiting and revising that post and exploring some of the ideas in further in light of recent discussions (eg, Libra and central bank digital currencies).

The root of these debates is, of course, that many in the Bitcoin community see Bitcoin’s sort-of-anonymity as an important characteristic because it defends the individual against state power and they berate me for wanting to replace cash “in circulation” with a digital alternative. Cash, they claim, is freedom, and they are correct about this: as cash is uncensorable, you have the freedom to buy what ever you want with it.

So should we replace cash with an anonymous cryptocurrency or digital currency? There are many people who I greatly respect who think the former. For example, in his presentation on ’The Zero Lower Bound and Anonymity”, Kocherlakota tends toward some form of cryptocurrency to replace fiat currency rather than a central bank digital currency and one of the reasons for this is his (entirely reasonable) concern about anonymity. This point is illustrated by a literary reference to Margaret Attwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale”, in which a theocratic American government (the “Republic of Gilead”) has taken away many of the rights that women currently enjoy. One of the tools that this government uses to control women is a ban on cash. In Gilead, all transactions now routed digitally through the “Compubank”.

The Handmaid's Tale

It was many, many years since I’d read “The Handmaid’s Tale” so I went to my bookshelf to dig it out and re-read that part. The narrator does indeed talk about how the evil junta in charge of that future America took over and says that it would have been harder if there had still been paper money. But the truth is, I don’t see how. North Korea has everyone using paper money and virtually no cards. Denmark has virtually no paper money and everyone uses cards (and phones). To be frank, in the modern world, I don’t think cash is that closely related to dictatorship.

The point I wanted to make here, though, is that it is wrong to present the only two alternatives as total surveillance and anonymity. I simply do not accept that the alternative to the unconditional anonymity of cash and the crime that goes with it is a dystopian, totalitarian nightmare. That’s only one way to design a circulating medium of exchange and it’s not the way that I would design it. I would opt for something along the lines of a universal pseudonymous mechanism capable of supporting an arbitrary number of currencies, a Mondex de nos jours, an M-PESA with go-faster stripes. In a world where there are completely, unconditionally anonymous payment mechanisms in widespread use there’s no way to stop very bad people from using them to do very bad things, so I’d prefer a world in which there are pseudonymous mechanisms that defend against routine surveillance and petty intrusion but allow societies legitimate interests to protect against crime.

Does this mean that anonymous mechanisms should be banned? Probably not, for the good reason that it would be impossible to do so. More likely would be a situation shown in the diagram below where there is an anonymous layer that has a pseudonymous layer on top of it and a absonymous (I made this word up) on top of that. People, governments and businesses would use the pseudonymous layer for the majority of transactions: the anonymous money would be useless for almost all transactions for almost all people since no-one would accept it. I would love to give this kind of anonymous money the generic name zerocash, after the William Gibson novel (“Count Zero”) in which one of my all-time favourite quotes about the future of money appears, a quote that more accurately describes the foreseeable future of payments than anything from IBM or the IMF:

He had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that. It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it.

(Unfortunately, someone else had already beaten me to the name! See E. Ben-Sasson, A. Chiesa, C. Garman, M. Green,I. Miers, E. Tromer, and M. Virza, “Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from bitcoin” in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2014, Berkeley, CA, USA, May 18-21, 2014. IEEE Computer Society, pp.459–474 (2014). But I’ll stick to using the all lower-case zerocash to mean generic unconditionally anonymous electronic cash. The wallet that this electronic cash is stored in is an anonymous digital identity. It’s just a string of bits.)

Now, you could imagine some form of zerocash in circulation as a cash alternative but not accepted in polite society (i.e., any attempt to spend it would be regarded as prima facie evidence of money laundering and exchanges would be barred from handling it). Polite society instead decides to protect privacy through managed conditional anonymity, or pseudonymity. A pseudonymous currency that is managed by a central bank but where transactions take place on a distributed ledger is much more like “RSCoin”, the cryptocurrency that was proposed by George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn at UCL [Danzis, G. and S. Meiklejohn. “Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies”, NDSS ’16, 21-24 February 2016, San Diego, CA, USA] using Ben Laurie’s “mintettes” concept. By creating a pseudonym that is bound to the zerocash digital identity, we make it useful (provided that the binding is done by someone who trusted in the relevant transactional use cases).

Why bind it in this way? Well, there is the usual privacy paradox to be dealt with here: I want my transactions to be anonymous, but everyone else’s to be not anonymous in case they turn out to be criminals. I cannot see any way round this other than pseudonymity. There are people out there (e.g., my colleagues at Consult Hyperion) that know how to design systems that work like this, so there’s nothing stop the FATF, Bank of England, or Barclays or anyone else from starting to design the future, privacy-enhancing electronic money system that we need.

In the real world, as the discussions around Facebook’s proposed “Libra” digital currency have shown, regulators will never allow zerocash. In fact, in the light of the recent FATF rules about identification for cryptocurrency transfers, they will not allow any form of transaction that does not provide full details of counterparties. They might, however, as I have suggested many times before, be prepared to allow some form of pseudonymous alternative provided that we can bind the pseudonym to real-world legal entity through trusted institutions.

Bank are of course a good place to form and maintain this binding, since they’ve already done the KYC and know who I am. So I give present my pseudonym to them and they can bind it to my “real” name to form a nym. In the example below, Barclays know who I really am, and I can present my Barclays nym where needed, but most transactions with counterparties take place at the pseudonymous layer and I can present my Vodafone pseudonym “Neuromancer” there if I want to. My counterparty doesn’t know that I am Dave Birch, only that Vodafone know who (and presumably, where) I am. For the overwhelming majority of day-to-day transactions, this is more than adequate. This layered approach (show below) seems to me a viable vision of a working infrastructure. Few transactions in the top layer (for privacy), most transactions in the middle layer, few transactions at the lower layer.

Layered model of cryptomarkets

So in this made-up example, Barclays know my “real” identity and Vodafone knows a persistent pseudonym tied to my phone number. (Of course, I could go to Barclays and choose to bind my Vodafone identity to my Barclays identity, but we don’t need to think about this sort of thing here.) I’m going to reflect on how these bindings might work in practice more in the future, but for now I want to circle back to that opening concern about losing the anonymity of cash. Here’s another version of that meme that I read in Reason magazine (“Cash means freedom”) a while back: “Cash—the familiar, anonymous paper money and metallic coins that most of us grew up using—isn’t just convenient, it’s also a powerful shield for our autonomy and our privacy”

But it really isn’t. Your privacy is being taken away because of social media, people wearing cam-shades and ubiquitous drones, not because of debit cards. And none of this has anything to do with dictatorship. I wouldn’t want to live in the America of the “The Handmaid’s Tale” whether it had anonymous payments or not. I understand the concerns of those concerned with privacy (as I am) that there might be an inevitable tendency for a government to want to trespass on the pseudonymous infrastructure in the name of money laundering or terrorism, but that’s a problem that needs to be dealt with by society, not by technology.

Look, I think we should start to consigning cash to the dustbin of history, beginning with the $100 bill, the £50 note and that affront to law-abiding people everywhere, the Swiss 1,000 franc note. There are an increasing number of people coming around to my way of thinking, including the former chief economist to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kenneth Rogoff, who in his book “The Curse of Cash” argued that large value banknotes should be withdrawn not only because of their use in criminal endeavours but because they prevent central banks from using their full range of monetary policy tools. If we are going to start getting rid of cash though, we need to come up with alternatives the provide levels of privacy and security determined by society as a whole, not by a few engineers.

US cashless backlash: why punish retailers?

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The US is behind some other parts of the world, perhaps, but it is trending in the same direction. According to recent research, almost a third of American adults use no cash at all for their weekly purchases (it was a quarter back in 2015). Conversely, a fifth of Americans says that make nearly all of their purchases in cash. Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that some retailers, in some locations, are starting to go cash free. Now, as far as I am concerned, that’s up to them. Writing in the CATO Journal last year — “Special Interest Politics Could Save Cash or Kill It” CATO Journal 38(2): 489-502 (Spring 2018) — Norbert Michel said “it seems risky, at best, to give the government so much control over the form of payment citizens choose, but that is exactly what many policymakers are hoping to do”. He was talking about laws to ban cash, but the argument applies both ways. Should regulators care whether you pay in cash or not and, if they do care, what should they do about it?

 

Here’s a specific example. In March, Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons, stopped accepting cash for sporting events. Now, I imagine the people who run the Mercedes-Benz to be business persons who operate according to the principles of profit and loss. They’re not making this decision because of some idealogical position about notes and coins. They wouldn’t be doing it unless they thought they would be better off without the costs of cash.

So: should they be allowed to do this, just as Tottenham Hotspur have done with their new stadium at White Hart Lane?

There is no US law on the subject. I see in Payment Law Advisor that the US Treasury Department has guidance on the issue, but it states that refusing cash may be allowable “on a reasonable basis, such as when doing so increases efficiency, prevents incompatibility problems with the equipment employed to accept or count the money, or improves security”. Security and efficiency are precisely the factors causing retailers to shift to cashless operators as far as I can see, so the Treasury guidelines seem to be working.

That does not, however, seem to matter to the State and City legislators who rising to the challenge of dragging America back into the 1950s, when the payment card was a notion restricted to future fiction and the concept of a mobile phone so alien as to be unimaginable. At that level there is a patchwork of regulation. Massachusetts apparently has a little-known 1978 law requiring retail stores to accept both cash and credit although it does not seem to be enforced and the legislature has yet to say whether it applies to restaurants. Food and drink are in the vanguard elsewhere, such as in Pennsylvania, where the head of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association says that there are lots of restaurants (as well as other businesses) that want to go cashless because “places that handle cash are less safe than those that don’t have cash on hand” and that in a cash business “taxes aren’t always paid”.

Yet US legislators seem to be in favour of maintaining this costly and inefficient state of affairs. The New York Times reports that the New Jersey Legislature and the Philadelphia City Council have already passed measures this year that would ban cashless stores and New York City, Washington, San Francisco and Chicago are consider doing something similar. Their objection is that cashlessness marginalises low-income communities. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of these lawmakers, then it is a problem with the financial system not retailing. Penalising retailers by forcing them to accept cash because the financial system does not make a reliable, secure electronic alternative available to low-income (or, indeed, any other) communities is peverse.

I don’t want to discuss the causes here – that’s for another time – but the specifically US problem around financial inclusion is the root cause of the problem and that’s what should be tackled. If low-income people in Somalia can buy produce in the local market using their mobile phones, you can’t help but wonder why low-income people in Philadelphia can’t do the same, much to the benefit of society as a whole.

We need to go cashless, not drift into cashlessness

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Having just been to China for Money2020 and having experienced at first hand the operation of a cashless society, I’ve even thinking (again) about the design of cash-replacement payment systems for a range of perspectives, using China as a case study. The first point to make is that people in China are well aware of what happens to when society switches from anonymous cash to not-anonymous (I can’t think of a suitable antonym) electronic payments. As observed in the Financial Times, “that scale of data accumulation is beyond our imagination”. The Chinese woman making this comment (while observing that despite her concerns about privacy, mobile payments are too convenient to opt out of) goes on to say (somewhat poetically, in my opinion) that she cannot tell whether her compatriots are “constructing a futurist society or a cage for ourselves”

Not everyone in China is part of this revolution, of course. The World Bank Global Findex database, which measures financial inclusion, estimates that as of lat year some some 200 million Chinese rural citizens remain unbanked, or outside of the formal financial system. As in Sweden, the shift toward cashless is raising issues around exclusion and marginalisation.

There are, for example, supermarkets with different lanes for cash or cashless payments that act as physical manifestation of social stratification between, as Foreign Policy notes, the young and the old and between the urban middle class and those left behind (between, as David Goodhart would put it, the “anywhere” and the “somewheres”). I’ve written before that we will see the same in the UK as cash vanishes from middle class life to become the preserve of the rich and the poor who will use it for tax evasion and budgeting respectively. A “Which” survey found that over 75% of low-income households rely on cash, as well as over 80% of elderly households. The shift to cashless society must be planned to help these groups so that they share in the benefits of cashlessness.

Woking going cashless

Cash is vanishing even in Woking.

I think we should start to plan for this now. In China, as in Sweden (where the New York Times observes that “cash is disappearing in the country faster than anyone thought it would“), we are beginning to see what happens to societies that slide into cashlessness. I am against this. That is, I am in favour of cashlessness, but I am in favour of it as a policy decision by society that is implemented to meet society’s goals. I couldn’t disagree more with the Wall Street Journal’s view that the move to cashless society “should be left to technological advancement”. No, it should not. This is a matter of great importance and with significant implications for society. The strategy should therefore be set by society, not by technologists.

Now, clearly, technological advances deliver new possibilities to policymakers and it is good for technologists to explore these possibilities. But, as they say, just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. We need a proper debate and a regulatory envelope set out to move forward. I wonder if we might seize the opportunity and set down a technological marker for post-Brexit Britain by declaring that cash will be irrelevant in the UK in a a decade. That is, anyone who needs to pay for anything will be able to do so electronically and that anyone who does not want to pay electronically will be presented with a method for paying in cash, albeit one that they have to pay for like (like cheques).

This must mean that in parallel we must set a national goal to provide a free at the point of use electronic payments infrastructure for everyone. Otherwise we’ll end up where they are in America, where jurisdictions are trying to ban cashlessness (and thus keep the cost of the payment system high, especially for the poor) in the name of social justice. In New York, Congressman Ritchie Torres has put forward proposals to force businesses to accept cash and called them a a “new frontier” of anti-discrimination law that is needed to prevent a “gentrification of the marketplace”. Similarly, as the Washington Post reports, lawmakers in the nation’s capital have introduced a similar bill. A council member there said that by refusing cash businesses are “effectively telling lower-income and younger patrons that they are not welcome”. Maybe, but if so it’s only because those demographics don’t spend enough to provide the margin needed to cover the cost of cash.

It’s time to start thinking about what the requirements for that infrastructure are and consulting consumer organisations, businesses and government departments on their needs. We need to make a cashless Britain, not simply allow a cashless Britain.

Mobile money and the race to cashlesness

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The wonderful people of the Economic Club of Minnesota (ECOM) invited me to Minneapolis to give a talk at their October luncheon. I was talking, generally speaking, about my “5Cs”: the potential issuers of future digital currencies. If you click on this picture, it will take you to a video of the talk and the Q&A session afterwards. One of the points I made in the talk was the payments in the future are about my mobile phone talking to your mobile phone, not me handing something (banknotes, credit cards, cheques, whatever) to you. This means that the adoption of new forms of money can accelerate without updating or replacing cash registers or plastic cards.

The mobile phone is taking us into a cashless future.

Birch Talking

The Club had arranged for a driver to pick me up from the airport and take me to the hotel. He was very interesting man of Somali origin and we had a nice chat in the car. By the time we got to the Hilton, I thought I ought to call my hosts and ask them to have him onstage instead of me!

Why? 

Well, he told me about his last visit to the old country, when he was surprised to find himself paying for everything (and he meant everything, from a nickel payment in the food market to a $400 remittance to relatives) using a mobile phone.

“It works on trust”, he told me, “because there is no government”.

(I was thinking of telling him that in my opinion the reason it works at all is because there is no government, because in places where the government has done its best to regulate mobile payments, such as India and Nigeria, mobile payments do not have anything like the penetration that they do in Somalia.)

Mobile payments are spreading. New interfaces (voice), new security (face), new authentication techniques (continuous passive authentication) and evolving network coverage mean that mobile phones are simpler and more secure than cash for a great many people around the globe. But which country will win the race to cashlessness? 

Well, that’s where my driver comes into it. My reasoning as to why he might have been a good choice for a speaker, apart from the fact he was smart and loquacious, is that it is his motherland, rather than the UK (or Sweden, or even the USA, where the Federal Reserve tell us there are now more $100 bills in circulation then there are $1 bills) that may well become the world’s first cashless country. A recent World Bank report showed that Somalia has one of the most active mobile money markets in the world, outpacing most other countries in Africa. It’s even superseded the use of cash (their words, not mine) in the country. Let me repeat that for emphasis. The World Bank say that in Somalia, cash has been “superseded”. It is approaching irrelevance (apart form anything else, no-one uses it there because of widespread counterfeiting) as Somalia heads toward cashlessness.

(As I said in my book, a cashless country does not literally mean a country where cash is extinct. Some cash will linger for post-functional purposes, such as pinning to wedding dresses or waving around in casinos, but that cash will be irrelevant to GDP.)

Interestingly, within Somalia there is already an almost cashless enclave where “payments through mobile she says have rocketed from 5% two years ago to more than 40% now”. That enclave is Somaliland (the breakaway republic of 3.5m people within Somalia), and it may well be 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 I wrote about it six years ago, when I said that “Somaliland might well become the world’s first cashless country. Not Iceland or the Netherlands, Korea or Kenya, but Somaliland”.

It hardly difficult to predict that cashlessness would come to Africa first, because 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. The spread of mobile payments, rather than the spread of plastic cards, will see cash become irrelevant to law-abiding people in a great many countries. And that cashless world is almost here. As everyone observes, if you go to China or Kenya, you’ll see people paying with phones for everything. In fact when I was in China last, 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.)

While in urban China, cash is becoming obsolete, it is still widely used outside the cities, which is why I still think that Somaliland might win the race though, just as I said all those years ago. Don’t listen to me about it, listen to what Mr. Rashid, a tea seller there, has to say about it: “I never see cash”. And his teas sell for 2,000 Somaliland Shillings each. Which is about 25 cents. A quarter. And his customers use phones to pay.

The world of mobile payments has fascinated me from its earliest days and I’ve been able to observe its evolution first hand. My colleagues at Consult Hyperion worked on the UK’s first prepaid scheme, first WAP “walled garden”, the first NFC trials and, I’m proud to say, M-PESA in Kenya. Experience has given a pretty realistic picture of what is happening across the payments industry in general and mobile payments in particular, and my view is that we are heading toward a tipping point that will see us accelerating toward cashlessness.

 

 

xxx

Something funny is going on with our great British cash

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In our United Kingdom, the value of currency in circulation has dropped, year on year, for seven consecutive months (see chart), for the first time since records began in the 1960s. This is something of a surprise. For many, many years the use of cash for purposes such as shopping has been steadily decreasing while the amount of cash “in circulation” has been steadily increasing. Broadly speaking, the use of cash for legitimate activities has been falling while the use of cash for drug dealing, money laundering, tax evasion, payments to corrupt officials and so on has been rising. Hence my surprise at this shift in the statistics.

Of that cash that is “in circulation”, the £16.5 billion in £50 notes is particularly puzzling. Earlier this year the Treasury said that £50 notes were “rarely used” for routine transactions and that “there is also a perception among some that £50 notes are used for money laundering, hidden economy activity, and tax evasion”. I’ll say. This perception is widespread, by the way. A couple of years ago Peter Sands, the former head of Standard Chartered, said that the main use of the £50 was illicit and he’s a banker not a mere blogger such as myself.

Given this perception, I would have thought that is was time for the Treasury to tell the Bank of England to stop making life easy for criminals and withdraw the £50 over a two year period. But apparently not. Given that no-one is using them for legitimate purposes, the Bank of England has decided that now is a good time to bring the £50 up to date and make it out of plastic. Robert Jenrick, exchequer secretary to the Treasury, explained the decision by saying that “people should have as much choice as possible when it comes to their money and we’re making sure that cash is here to stay” although I don’t think anyone in the Treasury or anywhere else was asking for cash to be removed from circulation, only for a narrowing of the spectrum (dumping 1p and 2p coins, two-thirds of which are only used once, and removing £50 notes leaving the £20 as the highest denomination).

Oh well. I suppose tax evaders are more of an electoral force than I thought. According to the HMRC’s latest estimates that are shown the chart below (for 2016/2017), almost half of the tax gap is down to small businesses and they account for nearly three times as much of the missing tax as “criminals”. I’m not sure if these groups are natural Conservative voters, but they must in some measure account for the governments reluctance to inconvenience those responsible for the lion’s share of missing taxes.

UK Tax Gap Customers 2017 Picture

 

As an aside, the Bank says that it wants a scientist to be the face of the new notes and (god help us) says it will ask the public who it should be. But why a scientist? That doesn’t seem appropriate to me. Surely a much better choice would be the late and much lamented national treasure Sir Kenneth Dodd of Knotty Ash who, rather famously, kept enormous piles of cash in his attic because he didn’t trust banks. Or perhaps one of our greatest jockeys, Lester Piggott, who was once sent down for three years for tax evasion. I think the Bank should be told: the medium is the message.

Why do I keep going on about this? It’s because the people who benefit from the convenience of £50 notes (eg, builders avoiding VAT) are doing so at the expense of law-abiding tax-paying citizens (eg, me) and I have to fill in my tax form soon.

Transactions, hoards, stashes and exports

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In 2016, cash was used for 44% of all consumer transactions in the UK. That was down from 50% the previous year and from 68% a decade earlier. Victoria Cleland, Chief Cashier at the Bank of England says that the value of notes “in circulation” has been increasing year on year for the past decade or so and that “we are still seeing growth in total demand for cash”. This seems puzzling, considering that this year the UK will see 13.4 billion debit card payments (of which a third will be contactless) but only 13.3 billion cash payments (according to PaymentsUK).

 Studio 34

Now, as it happens, Victoria and I were both guests on the BBC’s flagship personal finance programme Moneybox last month [you can listen to the show here]. We’d been invited to take part in a phone-in about the trend to the cashless society, along with Andrew Cregan (Head of Payments Policy at the British Retail Consortium). The topic had been triggered by the head of the Swedish central bank calling for a pause in Sweden’s rush to cashlessness. At the end, Victoria and I rather agreed on the need to have a strategic conversation about cash at the national level. The issue in Sweden is that cashlessness is just happening: it’s not part of a plan that addresses the issues associated with a cashless economy (eg, inclusion). In the UK, we can learn from this.

But back to the steady growth in notes “in circulation”. The trend growth of cash in circulation running ahead of GDP growth isn’t a UK phenomenon. The amount of cash “in circulation” around the world has gone from 7% of GDP in 2000 to 9% of GDP in 2016.  On the show, I couldn’t resist an oblique snark about what these notes being used for (ie, money laundering, tax evasion and so on) since they aren’t being used to buy things.

That’s right. Banknotes, statistically, not being used to buy things. Cash is no longer primarily a means of exchange. The latest figures from the Bundesbank show that nine out of every ten euro banknotes issued in Germany are never used in payments but hoarded at home and abroad as a store of value. Not “rarely”. Not “infrequently”. Never. The notes are not in circulation at all but are stuffed under mattresses.

Similarly, down under, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Bulletin for September 2017 notes that the value of notes “in circulation” has gone up 6% per annum for the past decade while the use for payments has collapsed (from two-thirds of consumers payments down to one-third) over the same period. It goes on to note that higher cash usage may be concentrated in “groups not included in the survey of consumers (who may well use cash more often than the average consumer)” as well as the shadow economy.

Aha. The shadow economy.

A couple of years ago I was at an event where Victoria said that only about a quarter of the cash the Bank puts into circulation is for “transactional purposes”. I wrote a comment piece on it for The Guardian at the time, so I thought it might be interesting to review and update my comments using the Bank of England’s four-way categorisation of the demand for cash, which is that cash is required for:

  1. Transactions. Here the trends are clear. Technology is a driver for change but that the impact is weak. In other words, new technology does reduce the amount of cash in circulation, but very slowly.

  2. Hoards. These are stores of money legally acquired but held outside of the banking system, like the 300 grand that Ken Dodd used to keep in his loft. If the amount of cash that is being hoarded has been growing then that would tend to indicate that people have lost confidence in formal financial services or are happy to have loss, theft and inflation eat away their store of value while forgoing the safety and security of bank deposits irrespective of the value of the interest paid.

  3. Stashes. These are stores of money illegally acquired or held outside the banking system to facilitate criminal behaviour. My personal feeling is that stashes have grown at the expense of hoards.

    In a fascinating paper by Prof. Charles Goodhart (London School of Economics) and Jonathan Ashworth (UK economist at Morgan Stanley), they note that the ratio of currency to GDP in the UK has been rising and argue that the rapid growth in the shadow economy has been a key cause. If you look at the detailed figures, you can see that there was a jump in cash held outside of banks around about the time of the crash, but as public confidence in the banks was restored fairly quickly and the impact of low interest rates on hoarding behaviour seems pretty marginal, there must be some other explanation as to why the amount of cash out there kept rising.

    Two rather obvious factors seemed to support the shape of the curve are the increase in VAT to 20% and the continuing rise in self-employment (this came up a couple of times in comments to that Guardian piece by the way), both of which serve to reinforce the contribution of cash to the shadow economy.

  4. Exports. The amount of cash that is being exported is hard to calculate, although the Bank itself does comment that the £50 note (which makes up a fifth of the cash out there by value) is “primarily demanded by foreign exchange wholesalers abroad”. I suppose some of this may be transactional use for tourists and business people coming to the UK, and I suppose some of it may be hoarded, but surely the strong suspicion must be that at lot of these notes are going into stashes.

If, as I strongly suspect, the amount of cash being stashed has been growing then the Bank of England is facilitating an increasing tax gap that the rest of us are having to pay for. Cash makes the government (i.e. us) considerably worse off. In summary, therefore, I think think that the Bank’s view on hoarding is generous and that it is the shadow economy fuelling the growth in cash “in circulation”. Hence my point that it is time for Bank of England to develop an active strategy to start reducing the amount of cash in circulation, starting with the abolition of the £50 note as well as the ending the production of 1p and 2p coins (almost half of which are never used in a transaction before being returned to the banking system or simply thrown away).

As it happens, the future of those coins and that note are the subject of a current HM Treasury “consultation”. I urge all you of sound mind to reply to the consultation and hasten their abolition here.

Germany is an outlier

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The G4S World Cash Report came out and I was e-leafing through it when it struck me once again just how much Germany is an outlier when it comes to retail payments. The average German wallet contains 103 physical euros, the European Central Bank (ECB) estimated last year, more than three times the figure in France. Bloomberg says that cash is used in 80% of German point-of-sale (POS) transactions, compared with only 45 percent—and falling fast—next door in the Netherlands. I think they must mean 80% by value because the FT says that 48% of retail transactions are in cash (down from 58% a decade ago).

Perhaps it is that Germans are just naturally conservative people. The Roman historian Tacitus (55-117CE) wrote in his history “Germany and its Tribes” that the barbarian inhabitants of that land had traditionally exchanged weapons, slaves, cattle, women and such like to settle up between themselves but that the Romans had introduced them to money. Having changed their medium of exchange once in the last two millennia, perhaps they just don’t want more change for change’s sake. Or perhaps there is another explanation. The use of cash in retail is falling slowly and we all know that Germans prefer to keep some of their money as cash at home rather than in the bank, maybe much of the cash “in circulation” there just isn’t.

Given the suspicion that much of the cash in Germany is stuffed under mattresses rather than circulation in the economy, it was still rather surprising to hear from the Bundesbank that nine in ten of the euro banknotes that they are are never used in transactions. That’s right: nine in ten. Approximately all of the cash printed in Germany is never used. Not rarely, not occasionally, but never. So this led me wonder whether this huge volume of never used banknotes are in “hoards” (that is, legitimate money held outside of the banking system) or in “stashes” (that is, illegitimate money held outside of the banking system). Can it really be that the German predilection for holding some of their money in the form of cash account for these billions of euros in inert paper money?

Well, because of the current unusual circumstances with respect to interest rates and so forth, it’s certainly a plausible hypothesis. The European Central Bank (ECB) interest rate for bank deposits is currently minus 0.4%. Conventional economic theory would predict that at a minus rate, depositors would prefer to hold cash rather than pay the banking system to look after their money for them.

(One of the reasons why economists are interested in getting rid of cash is in order to allow the interest rates to go further into negative territory in order to stimulate economic activity over hoarding.)

Now, it clearly costs something to manage cash over and above the cost of managing an electronic deposit hence it is interesting to speculate what the German “crossover” negative interest rate might be, the modern version of the old “specie point” at which it was cheaper to hold bullion for monetary purposes rather than paper instruments.

The current negative interest rate cost German banks about a quarter of a billion euros per annum. The Bavarian Savings Bank Association sent around a circular to their members some time ago setting out their calculation of the crossover rate, which they calculated as something like -0.2%, or half of the current negative rate. However, as I wrote at the time, this isn’t really a serious calculation because, as it says at the end, it doesn’t take into account the significant costs of cash in transit (CIT) or the additional security expenditure that would be needed to guard cash hoards. But it does make a fun point, at least to me, which is that the existence of the €500 notes has an impact on that crossover rate. Now that the ECB has decided stop printing the 500s, banks will have to store masses of 200s, so the cost of storage and transport will be higher (which, in turn, will put a premium on the 500s in circulation so that they will trade above par). Just as an indication, two billion euros in 200 euro notes weighs about 11 tonnes.

While that calculation may not be complete, it does make the interesting point that although we have passed the crossover point already, no banks have to date decided to store their squillions under the mattress rather than leave them on deposit. It seems to me therefore that Bavarian estimates must be too low and that the costs of transport, security, insurance and so on are actually quite high, so the ECB will be able to push interest rates further negative before it gets close to a genuine crossover point that would see banks investing in larger mattresses.

Show me the money

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In 2016, the latest year for which information is available, cash was used for 44% of all consumer transactions in the UK. That was down from 50% the previous year and from 68% a decade earlier. Victoria Cleland, Chief Cashier at the Bank of England says that the value of notes “in circulation” has been increasing year on year for the past decade or so and that “we are still seeing growth in total demand for cash.”

What on Earth are these notes being used for if they aren’t being used to buy things? This isn’t a UK problem. The latest figures from the Bundesbank show that nine out of every ten euro banknotes issued in Germany are never used in payments but hoarded at home and abroad as a store of value, the Bundesbank has found. Not “rarely”. Not “infrequently”. Never. The notes are not in circulation at all but are stuffed under mattresses.

Down under, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Bulletin for September 2017 notes that the value of notes “in circulation” has gone up 6% per annum for the past decade while the use of has collapsed (from two-thirds of consumers payments down to one-third) over the same period. It goes on to note that higher cash usage may be concentrated in groups not included in the survey of consumers (who may well use cash more often than the average consumer) as well as the shadow economy.

Aha. The shadow economy.

A couple of years ago I was at an event where the Chief Cashier said that only about a quarter of the cash the Bank put’s into circulation is for “transactional purposes” (i.e., used). They have a richer categorisation than the Bundesbank for the rest of it, saying that it is either shipped overseas (i.e., exported), kept outside of the banking system (i.e., hoarded) or used to support the shadow economy (i.e., stashed).

Aha. Stashed.

I wrote a comment piece on this for The Guardian, looking at what the key drivers in each of them might be. The first, cash that is used, is easy. We know that the driver is technology but that the impact is weak. In other words, new technology does reduce the amount of cash in circulation, but very slowly.  Moving on to the next category, I know it’s a rather simplistic analysis, but if the amount of cash that is being hoarded has been growing then that would tend to indicate that people have lost confidence in formal financial services or are happy to have loss, theft and inflation eat away their store of value while forgoing the safety and security of bank deposits irrespective of the value of the interest paid. If, on the other hand the amount of cash that is being stashed has been growing then the Bank of England is facilitating an increasing tax gap that the rest of us are having to pay for. In this context cash is a mechanism for greatly reducing the cost of criminality while it remains a penalty on the poor who have to shoulder an unfair proportion of the cost of cash. In this case, we should expect to see a strategy to change this obviously suboptimal element of policy.

The amount of cash that is being exported is hard to calculate, although the Bank itself does comment that the £50 note (which makes up a fifth of the cash out there by value) is “primarily demanded by foreign exchange wholesalers abroad”. I suppose some of this may be transactional use for tourists and business people coming to the UK, and I suppose some of it may be hoarded, but surely the strong suspicion must be that these notes are going into stashes. Note “primarily”. 

My personal feeling is that stashes have grown at the expense of hoards. In a fascinating paper by Prof. Charles Goodhart (London School of Economics) and Jonathan Ashworth (UK economist at Morgan Stanley), they note that the ratio of currency to GDP in the UK has been rising and argue that the rapid growth in the shadow economy has been a key cause. If you look at the detailed figures, you can see that there was a jump in cash held outside of banks around about the time of the Northern Rock affair, but as public confidence in the banks was restored fairly quickly and the impact of low interest rates on hoarding behaviour seems pretty marginal, there must be some other explanation as to why the amount of cash out there kept rising. Two rather obvious factors that do seem to support the shape of the curve are the increase in VAT to 20% and the continuing rise in self-employment (this came up a couple of times in comments to The Guardian piece), both of which serve to reinforce the contribution of cash to the shadow economy.

There are a awful lot of people not paying tax and simple calculations will show that the tax gap that can be attributed to cash is vastly greater than the seigniorage earned by the Bank on the note issue. Cash makes the government (i.e. us) considerably worse off. In summary, I think think the Bank’s view on hoarding is generous and that it is the shadow economy fuelling the growth in cash “in circulation”. There’s something wrong about this, especially when we know that the cost of cash falls unfairly on the poor. It is time for Bank of England to develop an active strategy to start reducing the amount of cash in circulation, beginning with £50 notes.

The Taylor report is right: we should get cash out of the “gig economy”

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The Taylor Report was released today. It’s a report about the “gig economy” and contains a number of proposals for reform in the labour market to modernise the various systems (e.g., tax and benefits) and improve the lot of workers. I don’t propose to comment on any of those proposals, also having recently entered the gig economy myself, I can attest to both benefits and annoyances, but I do want to comment on one point made by the report that was picked up in the media. 

Cash-in-hand payments to builders, window cleaners, plumbers and other trades people should be discouraged through a technology revolution to collect up to £6 billion more in tax, a Government-commissioned review urged today.

From Abolishing cash-in-hand jobs ‘would raise £6bn in tax and benefit workers’ | London Evening Standard

The report notes, entirely correctly, that allowing people to exist in a cash-in-hand economy is not only bad for them (because law-abiding employers get undercut) but that it is bad for the rest of us too. Here’s a short extract from my new book Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin on this point:

Professor Charles Goodhart (London School of Economics) and Jonathan Ashworth (UK economist at Morgan Stanley) have studied the subject in some detail. They note that the ratio of currency to GDP in the UK has been rising (as you will recall from Figure 7) and argue that the rapid growth in the shadow economy has been a key cause. In their detailed examination of the statistics, the authors make a clear distinction between the “black economy” (e.g., drug dealing and money laundering) and the “grey economy” of activities that are legal but unreported in order to evade taxation. When your builder offers you a discount for cash and you pay him, you are participating in the grey economy. When your builder offers you crystal meth and you pay him, you are participating in the black economy. They define a total “shadow economy” as the sum of the black and grey economies.

…Two rather obvious factors that do seem to support the shape of the Sterling cash curve are the increase in VAT to 20% and the continuing rise in self-employment, both of which serve to reinforce the contribution of cash to the shadow economy. The Bank say that there is “limited research to confirm the extent of cash held for use in the shadow economy”, but Charles and Jonathan make a reasonable estimate that the shadow economy in the UK could have expanded by around 3% of UK GDP since the beginning of the current financial crisis.

…According to Tax Justice UK, that expansion means that there were £100 billion in sales not declared to UK tax authorities that meant a tax loss of £40 billion in 2011/12 and that will rise to more than £47 billion this year. The IMF have noted that while Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is not good at estimating losses outside the declared tax system, which is why their latest estimates for the tax gap are low at £33 billion for 2011/12. And while we all read about Starbucks and Google and other large corporates engaging in (entirely legal) tax avoidance, half of all tax evasion is down to SMEs and a further quarter down to individuals (according to HMRC).  There are an awful lot of people not paying tax and simple calculations will show that the tax gap that can be attributed to cash is vastly greater than the seigniorage earned by the Bank on the note issue. Cash makes the government (i.e. us) considerably worse off.

The suggestion made in the Taylor report should be uncontroversial. However, there are people out there who think that forcing law-abiding persons such as myself to subsidise money launderers, drug dealers and corrupt politicians is a reasonable price to pay because the alternative is unpalatable.

In a world without cash, every payment you make will be traceable.

From Why we should fear a cashless world | Dominic Frisby | Opinion | The Guardian

My old friend Dominic Frisby is of course, completely mistaken about this.  Whether the electronic money in your pocket is completely traceable, completely untraceable, or somewhere in between, is a design decision. As I point out in my new book (did I mention that I had a new book out?) where exactly that dial is set between anarchy and totalitarianism is something that our elected representatives should decide and then ask technologists to deliver. This is subject that I know a rather a lot about and so I can assure you that the technology that we already have is perfectly capable of delivering electronic money anywhere on that spectrum.

My own prediction is based on William Gibson’s prediction in the pages of Count Zero. There, one of the characters in this future fiction notes in passing that “it wasn’t actually illegal to have [cash], it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it”. Therefore I expect to see a variety of different kinds of anonymous electronic value transfer systems that are used to deliver pseudonymous electronic money systems and I expect some of those pseudonymous electronic money systems to be used by banks and others to deliver the special case of wholly traceable payment systems.

That, however, isn’t the point of this post. The point that I want to make is that we need an intelligent and informed debate on what we want to replace cash, since it’s going to happen. It should be society that determines how it wants electronic money to work. Whether cash is going to burn out or fade away, we should be planning its 21st-century replacement now. It’s an interesting question to ask whether that means Bank of England Bitcoins or not!

Csfi jun audience

On which topic I was invited along to take part in the CSFI roundtable on “‘Formal’ digital cash: The currencies of the future?” with Ben Dyson from the Bank of England and Hugh Halford-Thompson of BTL Group last month. The event, held at the London Capital Club, was hugely oversubscribed, which I took to be evidence of renewed City interest in the general topic of digital cash and the specific topic of digital currency.

My good friend Andrew Hilton, long-standing captain of the good ship CSFI, framed the discussion in his invitation ask the basic “what if”. “What if some central bank issued a digital coin that was as widely accepted as a bank note? Or, if not a central bank, what if a group of banks or payments operators issued a similar digital coin?”.

For me, the roundtable was both an opportunity to plug my new book (did I mention that I have a new book out by the way?) and an opportunity to learn in the best possible way: by answering hard questions from smart people. I won’t attempt to summarise the discussion here except to say that there seems to be a lot of confusion about what form a central bank currency might take and it wasn’t limited to the people in the room.

“Such risks could be reduced if central banks offer digital national currencies, which the IMF defines as a ‘widely available DLT-based representation of fiat money’.”

IMF urges central banks to study digital currencies | afr.com

Now, why the IMF would define digital national currencies this way is unclear. A national digital currency, or e-fiat for short, may be implemented in any number of different ways. A “widely-available DLT-based representation” would be only one such option and even then it is not entirely clear what “DLT-based” actually means in this context. For that matter, it is not entirely clear what “DLT” means in this context either.

It’s important to separate the topics to move the conversation along: do we need e-fiat and if we do, then how should it work? To the first point I think the answer is probably yes. To the second point, the answer is “well, it depends”. It depends on what we want the e-fiat to do. Should it deliver anonymity or privacy, for example. Should it work like M-PESA or Bitcoin? That’s a fun discussion. How much would it cost to set up “Bank of England PESA”? It wouldn’t even have 100m accounts and Facebook has a couple of billion. If they were to look at some form of shared ledger solution, where copies of the “national ledger” are maintain by regulated financial institutions (e.g., banks – whereby taking part in the consensus-forming process would be a condition of a banking licence) and the entries in those ledgers related to transfers between pseudonymous accounts (i.e., your bank would know who you are but the central bank, other banks and auditors would not) then it would be a permissioned ledger (without proof of work) that could work pretty efficiently. Either way, my point is that it’s doable, so we ought to do it.