Europeans still love paying by cash despite hype in digital currencies
FRANKFURT: Digital currencies may be getting all the buzz these days, but notes and coins still reign supreme in most of Europe.
Cash made up around 79% of everyday payments across the euroarea last year, according to a European Central Bank study.
Almost a quarter of consumers also kept some cash at home as a precaution, and 20% said they had a high-denomination note “200 euros (US$237) or 500 euros” in their possession in the year before the survey was conducted.
As the study notes, the results “challenge the perception that cash is rapidly being replaced by cashless means of payment.”
The picture differs across the 19 member states though. Cash is most dominant in southern Europe, Germany, Austria and Slovenia, where it in accounts for 80% of all payment transactions at point-of-sale.
That figures drops to 45%-54% in the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland.
The study also found that many people don’t actually know their own payment habits. When asked how they prefer to pay, a larger share of respondents said card, not cash.
That may be because nearly two-thirds of all transactions are below 15 euros, the report said. Purchases of coffee and lottery tickets don’t stick in the mind as much as, say, a new pair of shoes.
People mostly seem to remember the larger-value payments which they make less regularly, and tend to forget how frequently they make low-value payments on a daily basis.
The experience of some countries shows how things can change though. While contactless cards accounted for just 1% of payments across the euroarea in 2016, the figure was almost 10% for the tech-savvy Netherlands.