When highlighting insights and coming to certain conclusions as I did with our latest mobile money study, as a researcher, it’s easy to start to reflect on personal experiences from the topic at hand, and if so, to compare them to see if there are any similarities. In this case, I did. I particularly remember some anecdotes from my own personal journey from using cash to completely shifting to digital money.
Already back in the 1970s when I was a child in Sweden, I had some nice experiences with cash, bills and coins. It was always a nice feeling when you had some cash in your pocket. You felt free to purchase whatever you wanted, which back then was mostly candy and toys. I especially remember when my sister and I would leave our grandma´s house after a visit. Grandma would go to her purse and give us a large silver coin each. It was a Swedish five crown coin, and it was a really nice feeling to receive it.
Growing up, it was always nice to search around in your pocket and find a five or 10 Swedish crown bill, which I first thought was some kind of old piece of paper. When I was a little older, I got a wallet. To have a wallet in my pocket felt like being an adult. I remember both the smell of a leather wallet and the smell of the bills. I’d look at them, adorned with patterns, particular stamps and a picture of a Swedish king. I really liked it. Especially the feeling of when I had several bills and it created a stack. Sometimes I’d change my 100 Swedish crown bill to 10 seperate 10 crown bills, just so I’d have a stack of bills in my pocket or wallet. And if we went abroad, I collected bills from other countries, with their monuments and ceration patterns and colors. I was thrilled.
In the 1990s when I got my first mobile phone, it was quite tricky to carry both the phone and a wallet in my pockets. It felt like one thing too many. Later on, I bought a phone holder in which you could also can carry bills. I’d still carry coins in my pocket and eventually it became uncomfortable to carry a lot of coins in my pocket. When the central banks changed smaller bills to coins, I was pretty annoyed. Of course, it was better for the central bank to give out coins instead of bills since they lasted much longer than paper but it wasn’t fine for me since I had more heavy coins to carry around with me.
At the end of the 1990s, a collaboration between some Swedish banks saw the introduction of a so called cash card. It was like a credit card that you could carry around in your wallet and load it with cash at certain terminals. This was genius because it is costly for the banks to handle and distribute cash, but also positive for us consumers, because I think many of us thought negatively about having to carry coins around. Instead, this cash card allowed you to make small purchases (which you’d never use a credit card for) in most stores without having to carry coins in your pocket.
However, many of us forgot to load and reload the cash card, so you easily ended up having to carry around cash with you anyway. And from what I remember, not all merchants accepted the cash card. At the end of 2004, the cash card system was abolished. Without knowing the formal or informal reason to remove this service from the market, it just didn’t seem to be practical and convenient enough for us consumers. However, even though it was abolished, it gave us a taste of how money transactions could be without using coins or bills, and instead made many of us realize how easy it could be to pay for small things with a digital solution when using a credit card wasn’t relevant.
In 2012, a mobile application was launched in Sweden: Swish. The name was inspired by the sound of when something happens quickly – swish! It has become a huge success in Sweden. With this app, it’s easy and convenient to send and receive money from a private person, or pay for goods in local shops or from merchants, just by using an application connected to your mobile phone number. It shows how important convenience is for consumers, but Swish has also acheived high levels of trust with its customers; transactions feel secure, and money doesn’t disappear into cyber space!
Nowadays, I never use cash. I only use digital solutions like credit cards and/or Swish. And I don’t miss using cash either. The only thing I miss is the smell of bills and the feeling of them stacked in my hand. But really, the solutions we have today are much better. It’s so convenient with Swish, knowing that you always have money on you as long as you have your phone with you. And you always carry your phone. You can use Swish for expected or unexpected shopping, going to restaurants, for different forms of transport or if you owe a friend some money for dinner. Just type in or pick up the their phone number from your mobile phone address list, copy it into the app, state how much you want to send them, and swish away. With this service, you always have your “wallet” with you.
Although the Swish payment solution is unique to Sweden, it shows how fast consumers can become interested in using different digital money transactions, as long as they’re simple and convenient, and importantly, trustworthy and secure.
Today, my teenage triplets have totally forgotten how it is to use cash, since cash payments are very rare nowadays. If I want to give them money, they take for granted that the money comes in digital form, just like most other things today, and in particular, the fact that it’s all done over a mobile phone. Sadly, I guess they won’t know what it is to have a pile of bills in their pocket, or to know the smell of bills.
But after reading an article recently on where dirt and bacteria assemble – namely, through our hands and onto bills and coins – I’m glad they don’t use bills or coins at all today. A study carried out in the US revealed that bills carry a huge amount of bacteria that could cause infections, along with micro organisms that carry serious diseases that our immune system might not be able to handle. In the study, they identified 3,000 types of bacteria on dollar bills from a Manhattan bank.
I’m glad the shift to digital money is happening around the world. And I recommend that others make this same transition too if they have the opportunity.
A parallel development today in Sweden is that more and more merchants won’t accept cash anymore – they are simply cashless stores. Only some kinds of credit cards or Swish are accepted. This also makes them a less interesting target for buglars.
The ConsumerLab report Mobile financial services on the rise: Exploring the consumer perspective in Sub-Saharan Africa, describes this transition from cash to digital money that already started in the region more than ten years ago. One of the key findings is that the pandemic and the fear of being infected by COVID-19 has caused an increase in the number of people using mobile money, and those already use it, use it more. In fact, half of respondents across the surveyed countries claim to have started or increased their use of mobile money due to the pandemic, and as many as 76 percent think that mobile money is ideal in helping them to avoid infection. Not by bacteria this time, but the virus. Consequently, 6 in 10 consciously try to avoid using cash transactions for this reason. This has led to almost 3 in 4 preferring to use mobile money via their phone, rather than visiting an agent to send or receive money.
And why are consumers starting to use mobile money from the start without any impact from the pandemic? This report reveals that it’s about convenience, simplicity and the speed it takes to use mobile money on their phone. These are the most important drivers to using mobile money today in the region. Combine that with trust and the feeling of security with the supplier, and you start to realize why mobile money is becoming a huge success, whether in Sweden or Sub-Saharan Africa.
The concept of the ‘Wheel of Success’ is also presented in the report, which includes aspects like the importance of secure personal data handling, the safety factors of using mobile money instead of cash, that mobile networks need to be more reliable, and the fact that the ecosystem must be strengthened. It also highlights the importance for employers to pay salaries in digital money, and merchants to accept it as payment.
Read the report on mobile money in Sub-Saharan Africa Mobile financial services on the rise (pdf).
Want to know more?
Read our blog post What's the future of money? Here's the outlook from 2030
Read the GSMA report GSMA | State of the Industry Report - Mobile for Development
Explore ConsumerLab: discover more of our extensive consumer research.
