Cash

It’s the universal travel faux pas: You arrive at a hotel, receive your luggage from the bellboy, reach into your pockets, scour your wallet, and turn up … nothing. Or, perhaps worse, a large-denomination bill you’re too embarrassed to ask them to break.

For the first-time, over half of all product and service purchase transactions in Russia were paid for using non-cash payment instruments.

Payment industry players are expected to present testimony on Capitol Hill before a House financial technology task force on Thursday that’s weighing a bill to prohibit stores from refusing to accept cash.

The city would join San Francisco and Philadelphia among cities that prohibit stores and restaurants from only accepting electronic payments.

Cold, hard currency is still a crucial part of a competitive payments strategy, particularly in massive markets like Indonesia, Korea, Japan and India, says Rapyd's Joel Yarbrough.

Pakistan’s central government is using its post offices to follow through on an initiative to ease electronic funds movement for remote workers sending money home.

New data analytics could help provide more comfort to banks in doing business with the cannabis industry, despite restrictive federal laws.

Large brands such as Barclays and Amazon recently reversed course and allowed cash to accompany clearly digital strategies, moves that made more sense politically than economically. The question is how long public policy can be the main factor in slowing cash’s decline.

The adoption of payment cards over cash varies by nation, but debit ruled nearly everywhere on the continent.

Cash access has grown tighter in the U.K. as more consumers adopt digital payments and banks shrink their fleets of branches and ATMs. Could the U.S. could see a similar phenomenon?

Payments innovation is happening in small businesses like Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant, which has to manage a shift in how people shop, order, pay and communicate — all at the same time.

Cash is not dead, but the burdens of ensuring access threaten to break long-standing ecosystems that sustain traditional payments.

The challenge with cash is its nature makes it hard to transition away from it. On the other end of the scale, digital-only businesses may never accept cash, meaning they may always exclude the cash-based consumer.

Months after retooling its Amazon Go store checkout process to accommodate customers who prefer to pay with cash, the e-commerce giant had added a way for consumers to pay for Amazon e-commerce purchases with cash at U.S. Western Union outlets.

Donald Wetzel, the man who devised the first U.S. cash dispenser, says automated tellers will always exist — even as they evolve beyond their initial purpose.

Many in the payments industry insist that cash is becoming less important — but that doesn't mean it will ever go away.

As the U.K. rapidly transitions toward a cashless society — with U.K. Finance predicting that by 2028, just 9% of payments will be in cash — even pocket money is going digital. And the disappearance of tactile interaction with cash changes how kids learn about budgeting.

Streaming and ride-hailing services have become an entry point for cash-reliant customers in the Philippines to try electronic payments, according to a report by Visa Inc.

The London-based retail foreign exchange firm ChangeGroup has acquired the retail branch arm of the Swedish finance group SVEA Ekonomi to serve consumers who continue to demand cash payments.

Mexico is considering a ban on the use of cash for purchasing gasoline and to pay for tolls as a way to fight tax evasion and money laundering, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions.