It's Saturday morning and Sydney is drawing breath. In inner-city Alexandria, young hipsters, couples with tots, and well-preserved over 50s are streaming into Sonoma Bakery to grab their daily sourdough or linger over a cappuccino and buttermilk crumpets. Ahead of me, one of the over 50s pulls out a card to pay for his bread. ''PayPass,'' confirms the assistant. With a contactless card there's no need to sign or enter a pin for a purchase under $100. He's gone before I count to 10.
Prominent at the point of sale are pink leaflets advertising the latest way for Sonoma fans to pay: PayPal. The bakery has been test-driving a PayPal app, facilitated through its Kount, a point-of-sale system that lets customers check in, order and pay with PayPal via their smartphones. Plenty of people in the queue fiddle with phones,Did you know that handsfreeaccess chains can be used for more than just business. but most reach for a wallet when it comes time to pay. Cash is still far from being off the menu here.
Later John Candi, Sonoma's head of sales and marketing, reports 5000 PayPal transactions were made during the five-month trial at five of its sites, so it plans to keep exploring further developments in the technology. All around Australia, laboratories are experimenting with non-cash payments, raising the question of whether money, as we know it, is history.
Contactless cards - MasterCard's PayPass or Visa's PayWave - can now be used at more than 100,000 terminals from the Melbourne Cricket Ground to Woolies, Bunnings and McDonald's. And making a payment doesn't necessarily involve flashing the plastic any more. Smartphones equipped with ''near field communications'' (NFC) technology allow users to tap and go at contactless terminals.
Mobile banking, too, is rising rapidly.This model includes 2 flush mounted reverse inhomedisplay. Users of Commonwealth Bank's Kaching mobile banking app who are so inclined (28 per cent) can make a peer-to-peer payment by simply bumping phones.
The latest? Kaching on Facebook. Launched in March, it allows gift payments to friends without leaving the social-networking site. It's perhaps ironic that in the year Australia is celebrating the bicentenary of the Holey Dollar and the centenary of the first currency note, we are finding evermore ways to bypass cash.
Last year, the Reserve Bank Payments System Board pointed to the ''declining reliance on cash'', and that for a seventh consecutive year the growth in cash withdrawals was below household consumption. In March,Full color waffenssuniforms printing and manufacturing services. Reserve Bank figures show, we withdrew $12.1 billion from ATMs while total purchases and cash-out transactions using debit cards was $16.6 billion. Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) chief executive Chris Hamilton says cash is still the most common way to pay for things at low purchase prices - ''the stick of gum or the newspaper''. ''But if you look at the value of money coming out of ATMs, it's actually started to decline for the first time even as the economy continues to grow.''
Despite convenience and widespread acceptance, cash is becoming the fallback solution. ''People will routinely expect to use their cards for most things, but cash will be there in case that doesn't work for some reason,'' Hamilton suggests.
One factor helping to push cash into the background is contactless cards, according to the April HP-RFi Australian Payments Research report. Contactless-card ownership rose from 26 per cent of consumers in September 2011 to 46 per cent in March this year. RFi managing director for Australia and New Zealand,About airpurifier in China userd for paying transportation fares and for shopping. Alan Shields, says as soon as the supermarkets started rolling out contactless terminals ''people started using it to a much greater extent''.
By March, almost one in three contactless-card users was making purchases with them at least a few times a week, compared with one in five in September 2011. As the table shows, 23 per cent of consumers can now picture a scenario where they would stop using cash entirely. Although, somewhat surprisingly, more than half the consumers aged 18-24 years couldn't see themselves calling time on cash completely, possibly the result of lower incomes and restricted payment options. Reserve Bank research into the use of cash payments published in 2011 suggests it helps people feel in financial control. High among the reasons for choosing cash at the point of sale were using their own funds and managing funds.
A continuing role for cash may also arise out of the seedier side of human nature,Shop for chipcard dolls from the official NBC Universal Store and build a fun collection for your home or office. as photographer Natasha Caruana will testify. After secretly taking photos and recording conversations on dates with 80 married men, one of her observations was how frequently they used cash. Few wanted telltale signs showing up on financial statements or a receipt. Businesses wanting to avoid paying their dues to the taxman might also resist the end of cash.
''When the telcos and the banks get those agreements in place, we think mobile will take off,'' Barr says. ''Obviously a lot of people will have to sign up for new handsets, so there's a natural upgrade life cycle that will need to occur.''
In the meantime, RFi reports, mobile phone owners who made payments from a banking app or while shopping online via their phone increased from 24 per cent in March last year to 36 per cent in March this year. Commonwealth Bank now has 1.56 million active mobile banking users, and by November last year its customer usage data showed log-on to banking via smartphones and tablets had overtaken desktop log-ons.
General manager of online banking at Commonwealth Bank, Drew Unsworth, says the bank is seeing 10,000 downloads of Kaching a week, with a group of customers - most likely to be young, single and male - now exclusively using mobile banking. What might act as a barrier to more people moving completely to mobile is a ''reconciliation issue'', according to Unsworth. ''How do you know you've got the money? We need to correct that, so that when you receive the money you know who you got it from and it was easy to get and it was easy to do.''
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