There are other patterns of cash-based usage, some of which are counter-intuitive. Saliently, Vietnam saw cash transactions go up dramatically in 2020 even as COVID-19 forced large-scale lockdowns, but go down in 2021 when mobility restrictions were eased.
Overall, the region paints a highly mixed picture, one that confounds the widespread assumption that cash is on a one-way path of inevitable decline, hastened by COVID-19.
As the authors of the CPA Australia report note, “Cash sales remain very important to many businesses across the region. Businesses [across the Asia-Pacific] were actually more likely to receive 50 per cent or more of their sales in cash in 2021 than in any year since 2017.”
In short, cash isn’t going away soon. Indeed, many firms in Southeast Asia have seemingly switched back to cash payments now that the pandemic is receding. Similar patterns appear evident in other parts of the Asia-Pacific, with nations such as India, China and New Zealand also reporting upticks in cash use in 2021 compared to 2020.
MORE HARD CASH GOING AROUND
This trend is also backed up by another curious paradox: The increase in currency in circulation, all around the world. In recent years, the demand for physical currency has increased even while the use of banknotes in retail transactions is assumed to have decreased.
This so-called “paradox of banknotes” has been observed in many different corners of the world, including the Eurozone, the USA and several other nations.
The picture is a little harder to discern in Southeast Asia, as few public statistics have been published on the quantum of currency in circulation since the advent of COVID-19. Nations such as Singapore had already been showing a contradictory set of indicators, with a strong growing demand for physical currency in the years before the pandemic, even as the national uptake of digital transactions also expanded significantly.
For all the latest business News Click Here
