Love going cashless, hate how it may fail

Offer a range of payment options — cash and cashless — so customers can switch it up in the case of a dead phone or a bank outage.

- Denise Chong

There was a lunchtime queue behind me when I ran into problems using my mobile e-wallet, and as what felt like the whole hawker centre waited, I dug around only to find I did not have cash.

The incident — along with the mix of feeling apologetic, embarrassed and plain hungry — is part of what drives me to stash cash in my bag despite loving the ease of using e-wallet apps to pay for almost everything.

The apps are magical for whizzing through in-person transactions ~ a couple of clicks and a flick of a smartwatch (it is like waving a wizard’s wand as you shout “emptio et venditio”, which is Latin for buying and selling) — until they hit snags like dying device batteries, mobile dead spots, and online outages like the 2023 DBS Bank and Citibank ones.

Going cashless is not some newfangled concept for only the young. In fact, Singapore had actually started its e-payment journey with initiatives like Giro in the 1980s. The cashless transactions promised convenience, which they delivered — magically, when e-wallets arrived in smartwatches.

Emptio et venditio!

Over the years, I leaned into what the Singapore payment scene had to offer — from ez-link cards, Nets, credit cards both swiped and tapped, to PayNow, SGQR and e-wallets.

But on the other hand, it feels like e-wallets do not help me lighten my load.

On top of smart devices loaded with a variety of payment apps (you never know which one will be hit by an outage), I also cart around barely used cash, and physical credit cards from a variety of banks (again, who knows which one will be hit by an outage) as backups. It would be awkward to hold up a queue for food, and really awful to not be able to pay for a bus ride home. Some days, I cart around a power bank too because a dead smartphone is like a cash-filled wallet that cannot be opened.