No cheques please! We are a ‘tap and go’ society

We’re cashing in the ATMs... as cards make spending much easier

WE’RE all tapping into the cashless society, with chequebooks and ATM machines going out of style, a report by the Department of Finance has found.

Contactless ‘tap and go’ is so popular and easy that people use cards 30 times more than they write cheques.

And the amount of cheques being written has halved in just over five years, according to the report on our spending habits.

We make 237 electronic payments a year and write only eight cheques, on average.

The report also found that ‘there has been a notable reduction in the amount of cash withdrawn from ATMs over this time’. It has fallen by €1,000 a year each, on average, and continues to drop.

Personal finance expert Brendan Burgess of askaboutmoney.com said: ‘I don’t use cheques any more and I don’t often get them.’

Notwithstanding the €30 transaction limit, the value of contactless card payments exceeded €1billion in just three months, the department’s report found.

Spending through debit cards hit more than €3billion in the 12 months to September last year – up 7% or €192million, and it is becoming the preferred way of paying for most people, especially with tapping being so popular.

‘The evidence also shows a strong increase in... debit cards which may reflect the mainstream rollout of contactless card functionality on debit cards from 2015,’ the report found.

The Indecon economic consultants’ findings, for the department, show Ireland has made ‘very significant progress’ in recent years in moving from a cash-intensive economy. While there is a risk that some segments of society could be excluded by the accelerated move to electronic payments, it finds that access to a bank account has increased dramatically over the last decade.

The total number of debit and credit cards in use is more than six million, almost the same as the level at the bottom of the economic crash in 2012.

At the end of that year, there were 4million debit cards and 2.1million credit cards.

The latest figures were welcomed by Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe who said: ‘I am pleased to see the significant progress Ireland has made in the take-up of electronic payments.’

The report also notes that the amount of money we carry is also dropping rapidly.

‘Ireland is also experiencing a marked change relative to Europe. Average ATM withdrawals in Ireland fell 7% from 2012 to 2016 although Europe experienced an increase. The country in Europe with the lowest levels of ATM withdrawal is Sweden.

Separate survey-based evidence shows that the reported ‘cash in wallet’ of consumers is highest in Germany (€103), Luxembourg (€102) and Austria (€89) and is far lower in Finland (€56), Netherlands (€44) and Belgium (€58).

The figure for Ireland was €69, it found, adding that our cash in wallet continue to drop as tapping becomes more and more popular.

National Payments Plan steering committee chairman Tony Grimes said recently: ‘Ireland can and should be a leader in this area. We have the youngest population in Europe and have shown ourselves to be very fast adopters of new technology. I believe the task of turning Ireland from a laggard to a leader in payments terms will be a very challenging one.

‘However, the prize in terms of improved cost competitiveness, greater security, convenience, consumer choice and reduced financial exclusion is, I believe, well worth the effort.’

The switch away from cash and cheques to cards is estimated to save the economy up to €1billion a year. When the payments plan was launched six years ago Ireland had a very high usage of cash and cheques.

It was also one of the few EU members that still used cheques on a regular basis – of the major European countries, only France used more per person.

‘I don’t use cheques any more’