Protecting rights to use cash

Banks’ urgent warnings over the pitfalls of digital-only currency

- by NICK CORBISHLEY

IN a major U-turn in the international War on Cash, the government and central bank of Norway, one of Europe’s most cashless economies, are seeking to slow or even reverse the mass abandonment of cash.

Only 3 per cent of Norwegians used cash in their latest purchase in a physical shop, according to a recent central bank survey.

In a bid to change that, a new amendment to Norway’s Financial Contracts Act came into force on October 1 that bolsters citizens’ rights to pay with cash in retail settings. The new legislation could sound the death knell for all the ‘we only accept cards’ signs plastered on shop windows throughout the country, reports the Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen.

In recent years a growing number of countries in Europe have passed or proposed legislation to protect the right of citizens to use cash as payment.

They include Switzerland and Austria, two countries where cash is still very much king, as well as Slovakia, where the Robert Fico government last year passed an amendment to the constitution intended to protect physical payments ‘from a future in which the digital euro becomes mandatory’.

Back in Sweden, which is arguably even more cashless than Norway, the Riksbank, like its Norwegian counterpart, has called on the government to adopt urgent measures to strengthen cash’s role as a means of payment.

Late last year, the central bank echoed a point we have been making for the past few years: ‘It is not enough to simply take measures to strengthen the availability of cash through withdrawal requirements and new depots, it must also be usable.’