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India Just Flew Past Us In the Race To E-Cash (backchannel.com)
New submitter mirandakatz writes: Since India's prime minister banned 86 percent of the rupee notes in circulation last month, citizens have been waiting in hours-long lines for ATMs. But these circumstances have also created an unexpected progression: a burgeoning cashless economy. At Backchannel, Lauren Razavi explores how India is now beating many Western countries in adopting mobile payments, and how demonetization has triggered a radical shift toward reimagining India's enormous informal economy as a data-driven digital marketplace. From the report: "Before last month, Paytm, a mobile app that allows users to pay for everything from pizza to utility bills, saw steady business -- it was processing between 2.5 and 3 million transactions a day. Now, usage of the app has close to doubled. 6 million transactions a day is common; 5 million is considered a bad day. Rather than being forced to idle away time in excruciatingly long lines, 'people are proactively exploring other ways to settle payments besides cash,' says Deepak Abbot, senior vice president at Paytm. 'Now people are realizing they don't need to really line up, because merchants are starting to accept other forms of payment.' All of this has created a newfound system that practically incentives mobile payment. With so many people queuing up at banks every day -- and a lot of Indian bureaucracy to wade through in order to open a traditional bank account or line of credit -- the appeal of more convenient digital alternatives is easy to understand. According to a report in the Hindu Business Line, as many as 233 million unbanked people in India are skipping plastic and moving straight to digital transactions. 'Cash has lost its credibility and payments are no longer perceived in the same way,' says Upasana Taku, the cofounder of Indian mobile wallet company MobiKwik, which reported a 40 percent increase in downloads and a 7,000 percent increase in bank transfers since demonetization. 'There's chaos at the moment but also relief that India will now be an improved economy,' she says."
Not sure how this is marked as interesting when it is completely devoid of any sort of actual fact.
First of all, the summary states 6 million transactions a day. That's over 2 billion transactions per year. Transactions and dollar amount are two completely different things. So how many is Apple Pay processing? The only number I could find for Apple Pay states was that in 2015 they processed almost $11billion
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/06/01/apple-pay-transactions-totaled-109b-in-2015-suffers-growing-pains-report-says
So that would mean that for Apple Pay to be competing with over 2 billion transactions per year, the average transaction would be less than $6, which is highly doubtful.
This doesn't make it sound like Apple Pay is really kicking ass at all:
http://www.pymnts.com/news/2015/new-apple-pay-adoption-numbers/
Neither does this:
http://www.pymnts.com/apple-pay-tracker/2016/apple-pays-big-drop/
So where are your stats? I don't believe Apple Pay is processing more than 6 million transactions a day, or even 1 million for that matter. Is you use an average transaction amount of $20 Apple would be processing around 1.5 million transactions a day based on the amount they processed in 2015.
Elimination of cash means that VISA and MASTERCARD know everything you're doing, and take 2% off the top of every transaction.
Cashless transactions in India became widespread when a rice distribution scheme was replaced by direct payments to debit cards issued to the poor. Under the old system, about 80% of the rice was stolen before it reached the final recipients. Compared to that, 2% is nothing.
That's a race I don't want to win.
Agreed.
There seems to be a general war on cash.
Australia is talking about getting rid of the $100 note.
Europe is limiting cash transactions.
I think there are a few reasons for this.
1- Negative Interest Rates. ie It is better to hoard cash than have it in a bank earning -ve interest.
2- Govts need more tax revenue
3- Long term globalist agenda to have a cashless society so all men can be controlled as predicted 2000 years ago in Revelations 13
16And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, 17so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark — the name of the beast or the number of its name.
46137
The problem is that there are a ton of freeloaders in India that aren't paying their taxes. This is a clear-cut way to track down that money.
It isn't working out that way. If you have over about $10,000 in rupees you need to have an explanation of where they came from. But plenty of services have popped up that, for a small cut, will spread your cash out over many smaller transactions, each under the threshold. Competition has driven the price of these laundering services down so far, that many people with legitimate cash are using them just to avoid standing in line at the bank for hours.