Capital One recently conducted a survey in the payment and financial services industry and found that over half the experts in the field believe the U.S. will be a totally cashless society by 2030. Most of them think that mobile devices with fingerprint readers will end up being the leading form of payment in this new cashless world. Currently, about 85% of all transactions in the world today are cash based, led primarily by developing countries. In fact, the majority of people in places like Africa, India and South America don’t even have bank accounts. Here in the U.S. though, only about 8% of consumers do not have a bank account. And of course, a debit card generally comes with a bank account. Only about 40% of transactions conducted in the U.S. are carried out using cash. That’s still a surprisingly high percentage, but experts nonetheless seem to believe America will mostly give up paper and coin transactions. One major reason they see cash falling by the wayside is because cash is actually really expensive! It’s estimated that about 1.5% of U.S. GDP is spent handling cash…printing it, distributing it, securing it, collecting it, cleaning it. So our government has a huge incentive to encourage electronic transactions. There is also the crime factor. Cash is pretty much impossible to trace. Most forms of fraud, money laundering, black market activity and other crime is conducted in cash precisely for that reason. Some European countries are already close to ditching cash. Denmark’s government has a laid out plan to eradicate the use of cash by 2030. In Sweden, some banks no longer dispense or accept cash, ATMs are increasingly being removed and a growing number of stores won’t take cash. Only about 2% of the countries financial transactions are cash based at this point. Cash transactions of more than 2,500 euros have already been banned in Spain, and France and Italy have both banned all cash transactions of more than 1,000 euros. In Australia, banking experts have predicted they will be a cashless society by 2022, just six years from now! The idea of the government being able to monitor absolutely every transaction we make is not something I see going over well in the U.S., as it is in total opposition to some of our most highly valued liberties and privacy. I suspect if Washington makes the push we will start to see more protests and objections from the crowd. Bottom-line, it will be extremely interesting to see how the battle between technology, government and consumer privacy plays itself out during the next few years. I would propose bracing yourself for some extreme change!