As Expert Online reports, the Danish government has decided to launch a program of measures aimed at accelerating economic development, reducing the cost of goods, and increasing productivity. The Danish Bankers Association Finansrådet believes that abandoning cash will help Danish businesses reduce security costs and other non-production expenses.
The Danes have already begun to wean themselves off cash – both paper and metal. Almost every third resident of the kingdom uses MobilePay, a Danske Bank application that allows payments via smartphone.
Skeptics argue that fully cashless transactions will increase the risk of fraud. In this, they refer to Sweden. In this Nordic country, which has one of the highest levels of bank transfers per capita in the European Union, the number of bank card frauds has doubled over the last decade.
Danske Bank, however, has taken measures to combat fraud by linking individual accounts in MobilePay to users' social security numbers.
Of course, such a measure as the abolition of cash payments must be approved by parliament, but the date of voting in the Folketing has not yet been set. Observers believe that in a country like Denmark, where the percentage of cashless payments is very high, there should be no problems with the approval of this law.
All five Scandinavian countries are at the forefront of abolishing cash payments, even for the smallest transactions. The most dissatisfied with innovations are criminals. In 2013, a robber broke into a Swedish bank and was horrified to find that there was no cash in the bank. The situation is similar in five of the six largest Swedish banks. According to forecasts, Sweden may completely abandon cash by 2030.