Pins going to the wall as young abandon cash

Rise of contactless means banks have to remind millennials of codes as ‘their lives are in phones’

YOUNGER generations have abandoned cash to such an extent they can no longer remember their bank Pin.

Hundreds of thousands of millennials and members of Generation Z use cash so rarely they now ask for Pin reminders on their mobile banking apps every month, new figures have revealed.

Without the four-digit code they are not able to withdraw physical money from cash machines.

In April, close to quarter of a million Santander customers asked their bank to remind them what their pass codes were.

But, two thirds of this group was made up of millennials and “zoomers”, defined as the two generations born between the early 1980s and the 2000s.

Just 11 per cent of people requesting help were mid-century “baby boomers”, while a fifth were “Gen X” – the generation born in the 1970s.

At Lloyds, Britain’s retail biggest bank, around 60 per cent of customers asking for Pin reminders so far this year were aged under 40.

Meanwhile, at HSBC, around a thousand customers ask what their Pins are every week.

The cause of the nation’s forgetfulness is the rise of contactless card payments typically favoured by younger generations, research has suggested.

The maximum consumers can spend using contactless payment increased to £100 in October, up from £45.

Mobile phone payment systems with services such as Apple Pay, which allow contactless payments via facial ID recognition software or fingerprint scanning, are also shaping new habits.

Two fifths of shoppers in a survey carried out by payments firm Marqeta admitted to forgetting their Pin, as it had been so long since they had paid via any other means than contactless.

That figure rose to 54 per cent among those aged under 24. Anna Porra, of the firm, said the “age of the bulky physical wallet was moving into the rear view”, as cash machine closures and inconvenient bank opening times had created “a perfect storm to shift consumer appetite away [from cash]”.

Other technologies that threaten to do away with the traditional chip and pin include “biometric” cards that use fingerprint verification to approve transactions rather than the familiar four-digit code.

David Blake, professor of finance at Bayes Business School of the University of London, said “everything is heading towards the elimination of cash”.

“Often the only thing younger people have on them these days is their mobile phone sticking out of their back pocket.

“They have no bags, they carry no cash, their lives are in their phones – including now their wallets,” he said.

Britain has lost more than a third of its bank branches to closures over the past 10 years, with cash use plummeting by close to a fifth in 2020 alone, according to research from the House of Commons Library.

In just the past four years almost 13,000 cash machines have been taken out of service – a drop of 20 per cent.