Or shell try and finalize an agreement on the u. K. The from the European Union speaking to follow up shortly before she warns lawmakers that rejecting the deal with only. Paying without cash is fast becoming the norm. I pay even tiny amounts with my card its just easier and its becoming easier and easier. Will cash soon be a thing of the past. When i think about it i paid more without cash and with. We cannot you have. More. Around the world financial corporations politicians and leading economists are working to do away with. I see a future where you will be able to hold digital euro digital dollars to rock where you at the soundtrack. Who stands to profit from a World Without money and who will be the losers. Without suzanna many people would have problems getting their hands on money here in the socalled swabian alps a rural part of south west germany she drives out to villages that no longer have a bank or cash machine to dump typo in when i started my training at the bank was still opening new branches so i never thought i would end up providing my customers with money and other Banking Services in this way they Couldnt Go Meet God and ever down the buntin sliced off assaults. The outlying areas around the town of hide behind she has specially assigned stops where she parks and then sets up shop. This bank on wheels provides the usual over the Counter Services it has an a. T. M. And a machine for printing Bank Statements many here are fed up that they have no bank in their area. That would be much better said young people like me can use unlined banking but i still need cash. Theres no other option in this area any more theres nothing this is a this is probably just a temporary measure for the next few years the banks are closing down branches its happening more and more theyre forced to save money in the winter so its. Just a few kilometers away from haydn high is the town of helping. The local bank closed here in twenty seventeen and help is not served by a money van. Anyone needing cash here heads to a local in called the oxen. Though having come into a bad time. You need fifty euros cant afford more. The manager uses his card reader to debit peoples accounts and pay out cash to anyone who needs it. He set the limited Two Hundred Euros after all hes not a bank he says. This is. Displayed or sometimes we go somewhere more discreet to pay out the money its up to the individual some people dont want others to see that theyre taking our money disfavor still. Need. Cash on tap so to speak. His customers certainly appreciate the service. As. We have this i rather have the physical money in my hands. Yeah thats right you can get a watch now to pay for things or transfer money itll even give you a receipt able lazy or otherwise y. C. All this is just the beginning of. A World Without cash in sweden thats now or bought a reality whether your buying a ticket for the tram or pass. A meal at a restaurant or cafe. Paying for the parking lot. Or even the public bathrooms. All you need is a card or mobile phone. Its. Still. There but. Weve come to a flea market in the center of stock and theres the usual array of bargains most of them can be purchased with very little. Sleep but you soon notice that virtually every stand has a sign berry Mobile Phone Numbers and often a name to. It. If you find something you like you just put out the phone and swish it sweetens very own mobile Payment Systems. For a couple of pounds for my assistant this one and dressed as six they cost about it and you paid right yes always post or no card all slip out like this patience is really good. Question. So how does this wish walk. Says basically you just need a persons phone number so you type in that persons phone number and it will announce like who the person is that it belongs to and then you will just get notified if somebody wishes me i would get a notification that the money is on my account. That. Swedens banks got together to launch the service as a joint initiative the aim is to simply find payment and cut costs. I never use cash from my view if you can be complete. I mean i think there we go i hate having cash on me they just disappear if you have an impact that sometimes i even throw them in the garbage because i dont know what took them but how much of. The prospect of cash disappearing completely doesnt fall the most people here. Most of the cash that exists today they dont exist in physical money so i think were already there and there when individuals using. A very tiny small step in this whole process which i think going on for a long time. Now all dissenting voices bought them be exception im forced to. We cannot use cash money as we know animal or at least theyre very very little because they think its a way. To use michael i would choose for myself what i would use not least i dont want to use a call to you because i dont know the people who work see it and i see it not safe to use my cars especially not my credit card. And. A world away from the Big City Lynn Runs a gas station on one of swedens countless small islands. She still excepts both carts and catch. A would say i prefer the credit cards if we try to keep the cash amount as low as possible we have this safety box here by the bears also risk with the cash. But. If i see as much or at the expense on handling the cash is now higher than my Credit Card Expenses and. Yeah i would say i prefer if they use it for her. Once a week lynne counts up all her cash takings and fills out forms the banks in her area have long stopped accepting cash. Every time she brings notes and coins to the bank she has to make a special. Trip depositing her cash is inconvenient and expensive but withdrawing cash is even worse the bank charges her nearly Two Hundred Euros. At their times each here where we need to to to take out change and it cost me last time about two thousand pounds for us getting callings there and back and i get them out i took out clients innocence any more than the same amount of money say and it costs me quite a lot hearing it here. She drives more than half an hour to get to a place that accepts cash its basically a deposit box for each bag of money she pays a feel of twenty euros so not surprisingly lyn can hardly wait for cash to disappear. The main beneficiaries of this development are located on the other side of the atlantic conventional Credit Card Companies like visa and master card but also new payment Service Providers like google or apple and amazon the online retailer has now opened a number of supermarkets without checkout customers simply scan their phones at the entrance after that cameras track want items they select facial Recognition Technology allows the system to identify each customer and build their credit card as they leave their receipt for their purchases then appears in the amazon go app. No cash its a trend thats growing in popularity worldwide last year visa ran a campaign in which it offered fifty restaurants Ten Thousand Dollars each if they agreed to stop accepting cash. I dont know michael ryan wasnt able to apply as his restaurant had already gone cashless ago we know. Ive been in this business a long time and i feel like. Theres a lot of stuff when you have cash around so when theres cash in the safe downstairs in the Office Behind the counter everyones dippin Everyone Sharing you share your joy with another employee theres cash always goes missing such as think of this eliminated after so that thats off the table but more importantly its like today i was late to work the place can still open because they dont need to go to the safe get cash set up the store you can just arrive and open up so its from an operational standpoint its a breeze its super super. A World Without cash is not the kind of world brett scott wants to see he used to work as a financial broker now hes a writer he believes preserving the ability to pay with cash is vital cash doesnt have anybody here to protect to to advocate for it because of its like a public utility so you have on the one side these highly motivated commercial entities and. Other hand you have care she doesnt have anybody who everybody uses it but nobody doesnt have an official Spokes Person or doesnt have a Marketing Departments so its a kind of an unfair battle. He came over from britain to attend a conference at Columbia University in new york the question on the agenda here is this the end of cash this constant revision of. The conference brought together a select group of Financial Experts from around the world none of them believe cash stands much of a chance anymore but brad believes the current trend is a mistake the best analogy to understand this is to think about bicycles. If youre living in a world where theres only bicycles actually maybe to be a good thing to go. You can travel further you can travel faster theres different to saying you want to get rid of the ability to use bicycles actually what you want to the world where you have different forms of transport in a similar way you want to world where you have different forms of payment so sometimes in certain situations you can use cash sometimes surgical but these guys are not calling for that they saying we want to world it is only digital or in the Transport Analogy only cars youre only allowed to use cars. When hes travelling brett sometimes pays by card but he mostly prefers to use cash. This machine does accept cash in theory only right now it appears to be on strike. Might force me to use my legs. With the swipe of that. Its going to send a message to my bank in england and tell the bunch of stuff to them theyre going to alter all their databases before i can get this thing here. And theyre going to log this and all the bill to see this so now theres a third party is going to watch what im doing. First machines forcing me to finally get it. So what role does State Of Play in the whole drive to go cashless. Back in germany at the university Of Seguin Economics students are wondering how safe Digital Payment systems are could we become completely transparent just by doing our shopping. That Companies Know everything about it. I. Think ill hit a smile every time i think i know who will my data be passed on to now it depends on what website you are on but often things happen very fast and he had no choice but im kind of admitting that when i think about it i pay more without cash than with but thats just the way things are moving somehow after dinner in very limited or program we live in europe where we have strict Data Protection laws so i tend to just be trusting and take the easy way out and im for the aspect theres also this aspect that everyone does it so if you think it cant be that bad if its so widespread i think thats a key aspect aspect right now germany is still very much a society that likes cash but the example from sweden shows how quickly things can change this isnt a model for when i do its an issue for two reasons firstly because in many cases you have no choice which takes some getting used to for people of my age. But secondly it raises concern because were losing an element of freedom here were allowing ourselves to be monitored. At the University Canteen students have always paid for their meals in cash first they purchase of power then they collect their food. But here too things are changing. So youre paying cash so you know students can now pay with an app on their smartphone. That their. So youre paying with blue care ok. But yet still have to check their plates to make sure youve got it right up on the bridge to. Find what you need to charge for i dont know one hotpot ok. As long as theyre ready its super fast. Its money its kind of this so want to the students think. And you say that it was simply easy and it really saved time but we were just saying we didnt know just how much it cost the app doesnt show you that the money is just deducted straight from your bank account so i have to look at my bank up to double check how much i just paid and they came back i did that is that they might get rid of the person that sells the Food Vouchers to get back home so theres a question of jobs but ok thats a separate issue but. Contactless payment is not yet an issue in susan actually it was money back. Then from where she believes thats a good thing every day she sees how many older people already struggle with doing back payments online or negotiating a. T. M. Who would like to thank you to take your time it was because you made a mistake before that the card recorded it but weve deleted that now sits a k. Go. To. The play i still need help i dont like machine. I dont like using the machine i dont trust it it. Was. So that actually helps our customers when she can. A Cashless Society is inconceivable to many people here. The customers want cash they just cant imagine going to the bakery of the local markets and paying with a card. Obviously there are pros and cons but if the customers want cash then theyll bring it to them putting it. Back at the bank itself in the town of hide behind stuff have to deal with huge amounts of coins and notes. Cut. The germans may still love their cash but the figures recorded by the banks tell a different story. Customers are drawing up less and less money meanwhile the bank says the cost of keeping all the cash on hand is huge. If you give it up or your other guys produce quite a few turns worth mature they put together over One Hundred Twenty Thousand rolls of going to a year using our machines as you know my goodness thats a lot in which you guys make. Money. And not interest costs which the banks cant cover through the fees that the customers pay but once in killed kill a dozen of us in our basement where we keep the money we generally have two employees working full time and so personnel costs alone are around hundred thousand euros a year thats with them that has been add the cost of materials to be much paper the machine electricity Maintenance Service costs meeting with in syria the rent for the room as well. As money is an expensive product as again it is an alpha niggas and. Overall the cost of banks amounts to billions of euros each year but thats not the only issue threatening diffusion of cash. And European Union is also playing its part putting limits on Cash Payments and threatening to do away with large euro notes is cash fast becoming a museum piece. Not at all says germanys central bank box the man in charge of Cash Management at the borders bank freely admits things are changing. Get going and got interests not going to do if theres a clear agenda going on here and we mustnt be fooled by that were talking about a lot of money and Instrument Companies are in a lot from the noncash instruments like a credit card human people dont talk about that much about but theyre happy to talk up the cost of cash and here again dont reveal is good here is that nonCash Payments also cost money and bob are times instrumental. Thats what im gonna fishing. Credit Card Companies like visa and master card as well as Online Payment Services like pay pal and the German Company pay direct earn their money by charging fees for each transaction. In germany alone there are over Twenty Billion Payment Transactions a year by credit card Online Payment Service its a global goldmine yielding over a trillion euros a year. Kenneth rogoff is a professor of economics at Harvard University and a former Chief Economist for the International Monetary fund he says having a cash system also aids crime and tax evasion. I think its not that cash is bad we should always have it but large notes the days when we need them are. Mostly theyre not used for anything good even in germany a lot of the businesses that only take cash thats for a reason theyre you know not paying all their taxes people want to get payments in half they want to pay taxes in some cases dont want to have regulations and i think the balance to share where more and more cash is used for that purpose and not so much for illegal activities wrong call for wants to see a world where there are only coins and small Denomination Bills for every day use he believes all larger payments should be made electronically so they can be monitored. It should bother the government that theyre printing these large bills and they dont know where they go it should bother us regulators that many apartments in New York Los Angeles miami sell for buckets of cash i mean really is that because theyre afraid of banks is that because you know they dont want to go to the inconvenience of going to the bag and getting a check or doing Electronic Transfer now i think we all know why the payments were made in cash and thats something we should make more difficult. As one of the worlds leading economists his arguments have global influence. In Nov Twenty Sixth India made a Shock Announcement overnights the countrys largest Denomination Bills ceased to be legal tender suddenly around eighty five percent of indias banknotes could no longer be used. Russian and the black market are the Biggest Challenges facing our country but. Since coming to power weve done a lot to combat that. The need. For days there was chaos on the streets huge lines formed outside banks says Panic Citizens sought to exchange their bank notes what made it worse was that anyone wanting to change significant amounts was required to do so via a bank account something that hundreds of millions of ordinary indians didnt tap. Into that even the money if i cant get any money the government is killing us with this program i havent slept for three days you cant imagine the pressure im under money. Box the Government Initiative was suddenly six. Last fall in one thing it forced many indians to start using a credit card and various payment apps. One common argument is that its a good thing that millions of people in poorer countries now have Bank Accounts and access to credit and Digital Payment systems that certainly the opinion of. Head of an Organization Called the better than Cash Alliance we are promoting the shift from cash to Digital Payments because believe there are benefits for development for wellbeing to improve peoples life by moving from catheter payment he says the way things were done in india was perhaps not so ideal but he Still Believes the direction is the right one. They have started a plan called Digital India which means they are promoting the use of technology into Government Services and all of those combines that have created a great platform for government Local Government and government for companies and for individuals to start being more included in the economy and being at the u. N. We believe that we can be a neutral convener among governments among companies and i want people to make sure that these shift is done in the best possible way. Better than Cash Alliance does indeed operate under the umbrella of the United Nations and works closely with International Organizations but is it really neutral and independent. Its members include Companies Like visa and master card Global Corporations like h. And m. Uni lever and gap theyre mainly interested in one thing making a Profit Initiative is also supported by numerous governments and foundations including data vikram soft founder bill gates better than Cash Alliance wants to see people around the world living in Cashless Society. Having the option to pay by card or mobile phone is a good thing brett scott believes that too but he has a bigger problem with movements like the better than Cash Alliance. Of course its a good thing if you can have new options for payments and new ways to do things so i have no problem with people getting Digital Payments methods when theyve already been forced to use cash before but thats a very different thing to saying they shouldnt be allowed to use cash or what it what i like that they have the option to use both of them. But actually what a lot of the people are better than Cash Alliance and so on theyre not arguing that thats theyre not just saying that theres payments a good thing theyre saying we should also get real. Of cash. Grants cant says that would mean we would only have one form of money in the future. The Current System essentially you have two forms of money ones the state money which is cash the other is bank money which is private right its essentially commercial banks that issue private private monies that where we call it the same thing but you have two forms of money. So not all money is the same on the one hand there is cash in the form of bills and coins these are guaranteed by the currency is central bank but most money more than eighty percent only exists in digital form as an electronic figure on our Bank Accounts this money is created by banks during day to day transactions. In a World Without cash customers could no longer withdraw their money from the bank because it would only exist in electronic form if the bank were to fail customers could well lose their wealth. Cashless society is essentially a euphemism for saying a commercial Bank Payments society a private commercial bank payment society thats what cash to society means. So who would benefit most from a Cashless Society thats what the students at z. Can University Want to know. Today theyre listening to norbert herring hes a Business Journalist who spent years studying the move to do away with cash. So it is extreme for sure if you think of an extreme case where every time you pay for anything even if its just fifty cents if you use a payment app youd be flooded out with receipts it would be quite difficult to check that everything had been hooked correctly or you can mean up to blue from. Things big question is what happens to the data that we leave behind it. Time we pay for something believes its outrageous that users are forced to sign a Blanket Agreement with each Payment Provider and then dont really know what happens to their data afterwards. And who knew or when i would only have a choice if i had an option of saying no and then maybe i have to pay a fee of twenty euros a month in return or in mourner. The virus choice and its my own fault if i sign up but if i dont have the choice to do or die. So what do online Payment Surfaces do without data to find out the students take a look at the terms and conditions detailed on their websites they begin with pay pal the leading online payment system. Jaeger is an extremely lot of terms and conditions assume. You cant really just glance over them and get an overview is so accurate in fact its almost impossible to read through it all unless you want to spend three hours finding out where your data is going to be sent to. Your ship you know search on the scene and yes you get the impression that its designed to make you click ok and carry on probably because theres information in there that isnt too good. What does paypal know about its customers and how does the company use that information at the german headquarters the Company Director is keen to stress that pay pal it hears closely to european Data Protection laws. Tightened is a dart share this data only as necessary for the transaction as. So nobody just receives blanket data passed on by pay pal its always for a specific purpose related to the work that we do shift it or the data doesnt remain with the Service Providers and often if its only used for the one purpose if it isnt going to. Pick. That purpose is subject to interpretation and can mean many things according to privacy advocates and Consumer Protection groups. And demand i believe the moment you agree that the provider can use your personal data for other purposes then make no mistake it will be used and then its back here. To stay with paved hell or Online Payment Services when you agree you automatically agree to your data being used for Advertising Purposes as well so its taken so it does get used for other purposes not just the particular service that you use the. Payment Services Like pay pal are looking to earn more than just the fees they charge they want data so they track their customers behavior closely pay pals terms and conditions. Includes a list of third parties to whom personal data can be passed its over forty pages long and include some of the big Data Collection Companies Like google or axiom but also facebook and oracle their one goal personalized marketing. Thing is highly alongside providing a Payment Service where many people say you dont and that much as a company there are other Business Models that focus on this data and shift its not clear exactly which Business Models those are but its mainly services and marketing activities. And perhaps we cant even imagine yet all the different ways that you can make money with data that would fill my conant last minute with a list and. How is a u. S. Company with headquarters in san jose it has around Two Hundred Thirty Million customers worldwide. So it presides over huge amounts of data. I mean these companies dont tell people how their users this is an open question i mean i guess we dont know how facebook users dado our google users data theres always internal and also different laws in Different Countries about how Financial Data can be used. But certainly. The the question of when you combine different data sets together so for example google and apple are getting into the payments businesses who are trying to get in there with say apple pay and stuff and they are already able to do other data like Location Data your search data when you combine those datasets with Payments Data you start to get that sort of three dimensional picture of somebody. If the data from our Payment Transactions can be used to create a perfect psychological and social profile of each one of us what effect does that have how does that influence our everyday. Lives and the way we live together in society. Going to have these systems where people are actually aware that they are being watched so they start to change their behavior because theyre concerned that their every small action has some implications. If you think about you know thirty years ago people didnt think that their every small action was going to be logged by some third party to be analyzed whereas now people are increasingly thinking hey if i do that maybe maybe its going to impact my chances of something so theres going to all these like psychological effects of being. Having all your small interactions watched. China is almost there already by twenty twenty the state aims to achieve near total surveillance with a nationwide network of cameras and facial Recognition Technology. Chinese internet Companies Like alibaba and ten cent already analyze their customers Shopping Habits and share the data with the state. Those who adhered to the governments way of thinking may get a better Credit Rating for example or a cheaper apartment and those who dont cooperate get punished. The aim is for total state control. And in a Cashless Society that could become a reality. Are you seeing this issue within the broader frame of Digital Technology more generally which is trying to monitor more and more things and bring more and more things that previously werent monitored within the realm of formal monitoring. And of course thats always framed as being you know its going to help you know people to get more services and so on but of course on the other hand its a new form of control. Could previously soon be a thing of the past. Sweden is fast becoming a Cashless Society the country is famous for its openness and people here are surprisingly relaxed about privacy issues. A couple of years ago there were a set the sights there on line the way you can see where your neighbors starring and your coworkers and i mean you most of us are kerrys courier says so we take a little pick but were also put in whether the family makes we are able to discuss. How we come. In from the beginning we are transparent in our communication to each other. In sweden we found very little concern that private data could be abused certainly no worries about state control. Feelins family playing without money is normal. Because. The children use it with both cash or credit cards so i can just go to my own children i have three three sons and the smallest one is now six and they have their own cards that they pay with and the either if they get to buy a milk kit that used a credit card or again to buy ice cream so we will see that the small ones use carts as well. Lynn is well aware of it a Cashless Society means banks take on a huge amount of power. And thats a cause of concern to at least one institution in the swedish capital the central bank it believes the move towards more Electronic Payments is positive but also forces potential challenges in eradicating cash completely. If cash would go where you are and we tend to think about cash as being the. Last line of defense so to speak that if you can pay you know by the way you can still pay. But if cash is not there and we experience some kind of disturbance in the electronic Payment Systems how do we pay them how can we get food few and these kind of things that we need in our daily life. There is still many questions surrounding the whole idea of a Cashless Society as one of the guardians of swedish Financial Stability the central bank of ricks bank is busy weighing up its options the rigs bank should possibly issue with digital means of payment like a Digital Currency and we call it the. This is something that would be completely new for a central bank to do when theres no one that we can really watch loan from so we have to do all of the footwork by ourselves we are just investigating yet to learn more about that option so how would a Digital Currency issued by a central bank work take Germany Central Bank the borders back it issues euros in the form of coins and notes in future ordinary germans might happen account directly with the bundesbank unlike with a private bank this money would continue to belong to the Account Holder in theory making it as secure as cash. Or would it be better to retain a minimum supply of cash and have that written into law for the students in seguin theres plenty to consider. Give it ten or fifteen years and i think we wont be able to use cash hardly at all anymore. How by good will not of things continue on their current trajectory and. I think were heading towards a totally monitored society. Where everyone will know that their lives are transparent and will act accordingly. Try not to draw too much attention to themselves. You know of. What the future holds is not yet clear what is clear a World Without any cash at all poses numerous risks. The main problems of commercial society are one the creator far more surveillance so you create with your financial surveillance state to it excludes a lot of people who cant get access to Digital Payment systems three it opens you up to way more risks of Cyber Security so massive Cyber Security risks. For it decreases the resilience of your Payment Systems for example cash has no central point of failure you know you can bring it down as it were where its a Digital Payment systems you can turn the more literally. And the points important for stuff like him politically its important because. One of the implications of cash is this is the increased ability to essentially turn off people that you dont want to do things so you can it can be used for political repression as well back in germanys rural southwest so that is heading how how was had day. I enjoyed it so i had quite a few customers and they were all satisfied. Money van will continue to deliver cash to outlying regions for now at least. As for the future shes not sure either. And i hope cash wont be abolished completely i think its important for people to still have the option of paying with cash for day to day shopping. Cannot but obviously its possible that i can certainly imagine it happening there even though i hope it wasnt. About. Saving money at all costs to. Consumers hunting for bargains and Companies Looking to cut costs. Trickiest is seen as a virtue but what happens when it becomes stooges. And how can it harm companies. Made in germany thirty minutes john d w. This is g w news why go from berlin to bring in our correspondent Ophelia Harms Our British joins us from from Rio De Janeiro were here to find out what happened is with me think of a correspondent found out its not and we do have some breaking news its coming into us now and its all about perspective closer of g. W. News thank you for joining us they had a unique movie the technology of digital experiences where transforming the world would be to use humanity ready for. The Second Season of our Documentary Series founders valley. Join germantown. At least