Beyond convenience, there are major safety advantages to a cashless society.
Proponents of cashless transactions and electronic money have often pointed to the risk of violent crime associated with storing and transporting large volumes of cash as an argument for reducing its presence in the economy.
In the latest validation of such an argument, Denmark recently celebrated an important milestone in the battle against crime — for the first time ever in 2022, there was not a single bank robbery recorded in the country.
Once a common occurrence, bank robberies have declined in tandem with Denmark’s dwindling cash usage. As the industry body Finance Denmark recently reported, from 221 cases in the year 2000, there have been fewer than ten each year since 2017 leading up to 2022’s landmark measure of zero.
The organization also reported a similar drop off in the incidence of ATM robberies. From 18 in 2016, Finance Denmark has not reported a single ATM attack in the previous two years, a feat it attributed to the Danes’ increasing use of electronic payments in place of cash.
Complementing Finance Denmark’s claim, the Danish central bank has reported that the use of cash in the country has nearly halved in four years, from 23% of all payments in 2017 to just 12% in 2021. It also found that in 2020, the total value of cash in circulation was equivalent to about 3% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Compared to equivalent statistics in the eurozone…
