[ad_1]
The pandemic’s push: surpassing the value of hypothesized smart paper money transactions in 2022 could come this year
by Davide Colombo
The push of the pandemic: surpassing the value of hypothesized smart paper money transactions in 2022 could come this year
3 ‘reading
A forecast of some time ago by the Observatories of Digital Innovation of the Politecnico di Milano indicated in 2022 the year of the probable advance of payments made with credit / debit cards compared to those of banknotes. An excess of value, given that in 2019 cash is used for 55% of transactions, quite significant for a country where the use of cards in recent years has grown very rapidly but still remains in the lower part of the European rankings, with 77 digital card payment transactions per year per inhabitant compared to 150 for the euro zone average.
Overtaking early 2021
Well, the passage of the Covid-19 pandemic, now we learn from new analyzes, has accelerated times and could have triggered overtaking already at the end of 2020 or at most in the first months of 2021.
The many permanent effects of this crisis could also include the new payment habits experienced by Italians in the months of lockdowns and anti-contagion shutdowns. In those dramatic weeks, for example, note withdrawals plummeted, resulting in a 20% reduction in the first half of the year, while card payments fell just 4% during the same period.
And in the following months, the trend of online payments or payments in points of sale made without paper money remained high in the name (also) of the invitations to minimize the contact opportunities.
Loading…
Three representatives of the Bank of Italy working in the Department of “Monetary Circulation and Retail Payments” attempted to measure these changes in consumer choices, and the results were compiled in a recently published occasional document (Questioni di Economia e Finanza, n. 591 – December 2020 “A game changer in payment habits: evidence from daily data during a pandemic”, by Guerino Ardizzi, Andrea Nobili and Giorgia Rocco).
The analysis began with observations of high-frequency variables indicative of the sentiment of the population (web searches registered by Google Trends with words such as “pay coronavirus” or “coronavirus tickets” or “coronavirus contacts”) crossed with the information collected through the Bankitalia’s Bi-Comp multilateral clearing system, which records electronic transfers, direct debits and payments made with cards whose balances are sent for settlement at Target2.
Cash more and more to the limit
All the evidence collected goes in the same direction and has focused, among other things, on the trend of an indicator, the “cash-card ratio”, which measures the ratio between daily banknote withdrawals by ATMs with payments card at points of sale. Cash seems to be increasingly marginalized from small transactions, while digital is increasingly popular for everything else, further facilitated by new contactless methods or the use of smartphones with the dematerialization of the payment card.
