WC CFO TheStrategicCFO#44 Online NZ Final - Flipbook - Page 1
Mark Pesce
Futurist, inventor, author,
educator and broadcaster
Mark Pesce is an futurist, inventor, author, educator and broadcaster. Best known for
co-inventing VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), Pesce has written 6 books,
founded postgraduate programs in interactive media at both USC (University of Southern
California) and AFTRS (Australian Film, Television and Radio School), and for seven years
appeared as a panelist on the ABC’s The New Inventor. Pesce currently hosts This Week in
Startups Australia, which has rapidly become Australia’s #1 tech podcast.
The end of
CASH?
By Mark Pesce
A few days after Christmas I stumbled upon one of the few cafes in my
inner-Sydney suburb that hadn’t gone on holidays, and ordered a flat white.
“That’ll be four dollars,” the owner replied. Digging into my wallet,
I pulled out a brand new $50 note. “Oh, no, sorry,” he said.
You won’t take my
money?
I can’t. I don’t have any
cash. You see, no one else
has been using it, so I
don’t have any here.
”
I was shocked to hear this - but not
surprised. I’d seen it happening in my
own life. In July, a friend had urged me
to download the Up! Banking app, and
within minutes the neobank issued me
a digital debit card onto my iPhone.
No big deal, you’d think - I already
had a few Apple Pay-enabled credit
CFOMagazine.com.au
cards. But for some reason I can’t quite
explain, it was completely different.
From the moment I had that Apple Pay
debit card on my iPhone X, I stopped
using cash completely - and didn’t even
realise I’d done so for a fair few days.
Tap, tap, tap.
Several years ago, without really
noticing, I ceased to have any reason to
write cheques. As an American - raised
in a culture that still sends heaps of
cheques - that felt weird. Last year, I
ceased to have any reason to carry cash.
Only my barber and my cleaner get paid
in cash. Everyone else gets a tap - or
almost everyone. Some of the stalls at
food courts in Haymarket still demand
cash payments - but even these seem
to be vanishing. We’re at the cusp of a
culture where cash has simply become
unnecessary. Or so we believe.
The recently released Fjord Trends
report from Accenture shines a light on
where cash is headed at the start of a
new decade: Only 13% of Swedes can
recall using cash for a recent purchase;
in the USA, 30% of people no longer
use cash in a given week. The future is
already here, but unevenly distributed and it seems like a lot of that future has
arrived very quickly in Australia. The
nation’s massive installed base of retail
EFTPOS terminals made the transition
to digital payments little more than a
hardware upgrade; the silver lining in
the delay in rolling out Apple Pay across
the Big4 banks (Westpac still isn’t quite
there!) meant that retailers had time to
upgrade before most of Australia could
pay via smartphone. Now that these
stars have aligned, the nation seems to
be ditching cash at a rate of knots.
