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We exist in an age where the bank note is moribund technology. And it's only a matter of time until cash goes the way of the dinosaurs. In China, for example, you could run a whole business from a smartphone. In fact, China's digital payments are 50 times bigger than those of the US.
Other countries leading the cashless charge are Belgium, France, Canada, the UK, and Sweden, where the amount of notes and coins in circulation has fallen by 40% since 2009. More than half of Sweden's 1,600 bank branches neither hold cash nor take cash deposits.
But huge swathes of the global population still rely on cash-based transactions. Globally, two billion people remain unbanked. Although the number of people who are unbanked get smaller with each passing year, some kind of payment architecture must be built in order for developing economies to leapfrog the developed world, the same way that China just has.
The risk to cash-based economies that don't have such an architecture in place was illustrated to great effect last year when Prime Minister Modi removed 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation in India. This effectively demonetised 86% of the nation's cash in circulation. It was unprecedented and potentially extremely damaging to confidence in the government and financial system.