2023-04-21 17:34:30
Those who gave them outdated by the health crisis and the rise of electronic payments will still have to wait: coins and banknotes are certainly losing ground in everyday banking operations, but less quickly in France than in the rest of the euro zone. This is shown by the survey published on Thursday 20 April by the European Central Bank (ECB) on household payment behavior.
The share of cash in point-of-sale payment volumes thus fell to 50% in 2022, compared to 57% in 2019, before the pandemic. But this fall of seven percentage points in three years is less than half that recorded in the euro zone as a whole. It even reaches eighteen points in Spain and Greece.
This decline is logical in the face of competition from so-called “cashless” means of payment, starting with cards, which now represent 43% of volumes in France, compared to 37% in 2019, a jump obviously favored by the extension, from the start of the pandemic, contactless payment: this now represents more than one out of two card payments in France.
Privacy protection and better expense management
As for the mobile phone, even if its use as a means of payment has tripled, it is still very far from replacing coins and banknotes in the pockets, since it represented, in 2021, only 3% of in-store transactions.
And these developments have not prevented cash from regaining popularity: 14% of French people ranked it as their preferred means of payment in 2022, compared to just 9% three years earlier. This is the reverse of that observed at the euro zone level, in which the preference for cash fell from 27% to 22%.
And nearly three out of five French people (57% to be exact) still consider it important to be able to pay in cash. Among the reasons for this preference are prominently the protection of privacy, on the one hand, and better management of expenses, on the other.
Declining number of ATMs
Because the attachment to cash is also a matter of standard of living, as shown by a survey carried out by the Banque de France in 2021-2022: the probability that people in a situation of “budgetary fragility” use cash to pay for their purchases increases 18% compared to the rest of the population surveyed and people earning less than 1,000 euros per month use cash more often than those with higher incomes.
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