Cash

The health care payments market is big – accounting for over one in six dollars of the U.S. GDP – yet it remains perpetually outdated with its heavy reliance on using paper statements for sending out bills.

Most agencies use electronic benefit transfer to deliver funds to prepaid cards, but recipients who need access to cash are often caught in a bind, with fewer convenient or free ATMs available in an increasingly digital payments landscape.

In the 25 years since eBay launched, various rival online selling platforms have emerged, and those focused on local deals like OfferUp have mostly stayed out of transactions, leaving users to work out payments in cash on their own.

The system has made it easier for mobile wallets and other technology providers to enter India's payments market, and will push the next steps toward real-time payments and cash reduction, says Somya Patnaik, senior product manager at ACI Worldwide.

While senders prefer mobile devices, recipients remain stubbornly attached to receiving cash.

The U.S. card brands are already pushing Indian regulators to relax their data storage rules, and a new quirk in the country’s tax code creates a battle on an entirely different front.

For banks and financial institutions, the wave of the future is using technology to optimize, not eliminate, their cash-handling processes, writes Diebold Nixdorf's Devon Watson.

Target in the past 48 hours suffered a pair of unrelated point of sale outages that had at least one thing in common — they resulted in consumers scrambling for a contingency that would have been little problem as recently as four or five years ago.

Dutch banks ABN Amro, ING and Rabobank have started transferring their ATMs to the Geldmaat network in the Netherlands to address the decline of cash use among its customers, while continuing to make it available.

India’s government has taken drastic steps to encourage and standardize digital transactions, and those moves appear to be paying off.