Sweden is on track to becoming the world’s first cashless society, thanks to the country’s embrace of information techology as well as a crackdown on organised crime and terror, according to a new study.
Niklas Arvidsson, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, said that the widespread and growing embrace of the mobile payment system, Swish, is helping hasten the day when Sweden replaces cash altogether.
“Cash is still an important means of payment in many countries’ markets, but that no longer applies here in Sweden. Our use of cash is small, and it’s decreasing rapidly,” Arvidsson said.
In a country where bank cards are routinely used for even the smallest purchases, there are less than 80 billion Swedish crowns in circulation, a sharp decline from just six years ago, when 106 billion Swedish crowns were in circulation.
“And out of that amount, only somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent is actually in regular circulation,” he said.
The rest is socked away in people’s homes and bank deposit boxes, or can be found circulating in the underground economy.