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Times are a-changin’ in London where contactless is king
LONDON, Sept 5, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – For centuries, London has sustained a
street-level economy where performers and vendors make a living from the
spare change of strangers — but they are being forced to adapt as cash falls
out of fashion.
Busker Charlotte Campbell, who sings for her supper almost every day in
the shadow of the London Eye top tourist attraction, was one of the first
performers to use a contactless card reader.
“Things are changing in London and people tend to use cards to pay for
things”, Campbell told AFP, before an afternoon gig.
“That makes busking a dying art if people aren’t carrying cash any more.”
Between five and 10 percent of Campbell’s income now comes not from coins
tossed into her guitar case, but from people tapping bank cards on her reader
— set up through her phone to debit o2 (2.22 euros, $2.60) at a time.
It’s a rising trend: a report from the British Treasury earlier this year
revealed that cash accounted for 40 percent of all domestic payments by
volume in 2016, down from 62 percent in 2006.
The same report predicted its share of payments would fall to 21 percent
by 2026 — bringing Britain to the brink of becoming a cashless society.
In January, the government spurred the process by outlawing surcharges for
using debit or credit cards in shops, removing one of the only significant
downsides to digital payments for consumers.
– Cashing in –
There are other signs in the British capital that businesses are cashing
in by banning coins and notes.
A number of lunch spots in the City of London — the epicentre of the
country’s finance trade — now warn customers with prominent signage that
they are entirely cash-free. Others assume that card payment is the default
at the check-out.
And some street vendors of The Big Issue magazine — part of a charity
scheme to lift people out of poverty and homelessness — have also taken to
carrying contactless readers to attract passersby who are not carrying cash.
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At Christ Church in East Greenwich, in southeast London, helpers still
pass around traditional tithing bags to collect donations from the faithful
during Sunday service.
But Reverend Margaret Cave has also been recently deploying a contactless
card reader to mop up one-off donations from her flock — young and old
alike.
“I’ve taken card payments from our 93-year-old member of congregation and
some of our much younger people,” she said.
“You know it’s safely and securely going through to your bank account, no
one can take it — so it’s much better than having cash from that point of
view.”
– ‘Cold war against cash’ –
But not everyone is sold on the benefits of moving towards a fully
cashless country.
“The big problems of cashless society tend to be split into three areas,”
said finance expert Brett Scott, author of “The Heretic’s Guide to Global
Finance: Hacking the Future of Money”.
“There’s the surveillance element, that you can be watched; there’s the
financial exclusion element, that you might be excluded from the system; and
then there’s a whole cybersecurity question,” he told AFP in an interview.
He said banks, card companies, government departments and financial
technology firms have all been engaged in a two-decade long “cold war against
cash”, attempting to convince the public that coins and notes are an unwieldy
inconvenience.
“In some ways, you can think about this a bit like the gentrification of
payment,” he said.
“They’re trying to push all kinds of informal activity or non-institution-
based activity into a kind of digital enclosure that can be watched and can
be managed by large institutions.”
Authorities are keen to move away from cash as the recording of
transactions makes it harder to avoid taxes, as well as to finance terrorism.
But the homeless, refugees and others who struggle to secure bank accounts
could be shut out of this new economy, Scott warned.
Recent history also seems to vindicate those with concerns about
overreliance on card technology.
In June, 2.4 million British card transactions were affected by a Visa
outage — leaving pubs, shops and restaurants struggling to do business
during prime trading hours on a Friday night.
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