The finance website Investopedia estimates that there’s approximately $432 trillion in circulation around the globe. It’s perhaps no surprise that payments have become one of the most sophisticated and competitive parts of the tech world.
Even a few decades ago, cash was the dominant method, and the use of debit and credit cards at the checkout only lengthened the queues. Now, in just a few years, mobile payments have become one of the most popular payments.
Mobile Wallets
UK Finance confirmed something we all knew already at the beginning of October – that 64% of payments involved plastic, including charge cards.
What’s surprising is that those credit and debit payments were (mostly) made via mobile apps, rather than physical cards. UK Finance’s Payment Markets Report for 2024 revealed that 57% of adults now use mobile wallets, in what might be seen as yet another death knell for ‘hard’ currency.
The data isn’t arranged by place, so it’s not possible to see how Southport compares to the rest of the UK. However, the PaymentSense website revealed that there had been a 49% increase in contactless payments in the North West at the turn of the decade.
Closer to the present, in 2022-23, point-of-sale company Dojo listed people in nearby Liverpool as having one of the highest rates of contactless payments in the UK – 94.9%.
The need for certain payment methods is industry-specific. A rural village store might stick to cash if that’s all its customers use, while businesses that take payments from a large cross-section of the population offer several options by necessity.
Specsavers, winner of the Business Leaders Award for 2025 at Your Southport Stars Awards, adds flexibility to the standard debit and credit cards with PayPal. The online processor supports mobile wallets.
National Payments Vision
What about purely digital businesses? The rise of digital payments mean online businesses are also seeing a need to expand to a wide range of payment methods. For example, in the world of digital entertainment, a British casino website like this one will now accept a range of digital payment methods.
Securing funds and personal details against intrusion is another side of the same coin. Luckily, most online retail sites are secured with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption as standard.
Interestingly, while a surge for anything digital is usually laid at the door of younger people, UK Finance stressed that it’s seen older age groups joining in with the adoption of digital wallets.
The latter news will no doubt excite the government, which launched its National Payments Vision in 2024. This paper mentions the uptake of digital payment options, but points to “distributed ledger technologies”, i.e. blockchains, as one (new-ish) way to spend money in the future.
Overall, the payments industry is rushing ahead without coins. UK Finance says that only 12% of purchases were made in cash during 2023. Still, the Bank of England seems optimistic about its job, noting that there are twice as many notes in circulation today compared to a decade ago.
Any more seismic changes – like blockchain – might take a while to trickle down to Southport’s coffee shops, but the popularity of digital wallets shows that the slow demise of cash isn’t over.