COMMENT: Don’t fall for cashless craze and panic over banking breakdowns

DURING holidays, I take on the persona of a drug dealer. British shopkeepers are often convinced that Pablo Escobar has wandered in to buy a loaf. The blame lies, of course, with our ruthless march towards a global cashless economy and a money changer at Lucky Plaza.

The money changer offers great exchange rates. He also hands over £50 notes. In many British shops, a £50 suggests a nefarious enterprise. Having watched nervous shopkeepers check banknotes under ultraviolet lights, infrared scanners and a laser left over from the last James Bond movie, I began to take it personally.

“Nothing personal, mate,” a shopkeeper once reassured me. “The only people who carry £50 notes around here are drug dealers.”

Indeed there are often handwritten signs in British shop windows. No £50 notes. They fear forged notes, which now has me looking at my Lucky Plaza money changer in a whole new light.

But I’m old school and miserly. Overseas cashless transactions mean poorer exchange rates and “international charges”. Cash is king on the road, which all sounds a bit “OK Boomer”, or at least it did until last month, when this penny-pinching Luddite wallowed in his smugness, watching the phone and watch tappers suffer a collective mental panic.

Singapore’s major banks went down, didn’t they? A rhetorical question, obviously, because you knew that. You received live updates as a data centre issue caused disruptions to DBS, POSB, OCBC and Citibank’s online and mobile services.

Those updates were genuinely superb. OCBC transactions have now resumed smoothly… DBS PayLah! is back to normal, meaning a return to grammatically incorrect sentences because of that pointless exclamation mark… A single ATM is still down in Choa Chu Kang, but the team is working hard to resolve the issue… In the meantime, stay in your bomb shelters with your tin openers.

In such crises, the Singapore psyche really plays out like that classic scene in Airplane, the one where the pilot announces that the plane is gone down, the passengers will all die and… they’re out of coffee! Last month, there was the ongoing war in the Middle East, disputes in the South China Sea, the most dire forecasts yet among climate scientists… and Singaporeans had to use cash for a few hours!

Cash vs cashless debate rages on

The banking disruption allowed the rather patronising cashless debate to once again suggest that Gen Z and anyone older than Gen X are effectively doing the same thing for different reasons. We’re all those bewildered apes at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey, leaping around an unfamiliar monolith.

The Zoomers are grunting at unfamiliar objects, as older people say “repeat after me… cash… notes… coins” in slow, monotonous voices. While Gen X and the rest are poking at unfamiliar objects as younger people say, “repeat after me… phone… watch… electronic wallet… No, you can’t pay for your teh-c with that, uncle Neil. That’s the metal buckle on your belt.”

But let’s start with Gen Z. According to conventional narrative, the last time anyone below the age of 25 saw a banknote was when they played Monopoly in primary school. Indeed, it’s become de rigueur among pretentious types to inform anyone within earshot that they haven’t carried anything as vulgar and archaic as cash since Manchester United were a decent team (which is either a lie, or they never pay, tip, reward or show gratitude to anyone further down the socioeconomic ladder.)

Of course, it’s childish on my part to make light of an event considered so catastrophic in some quarters, it’s a wonder we don’t wear black armbands every 14 October in future, to commemorate the day online banking and selected ATMs went down for a few hours and Zoomers ransacked their homes looking for unseen treasure. And just to clarify, we’re talking about a few notes and coins, not the Ark of the Covenant.

The next time Singapore’s banking services are disrupted, should we just keep a few bucks beside the bed or call Indiana Jones?

It’ll be the latter, if social media is an indicator. Tiktokers pondered the horror of eating only instant noodles for dinner. Grab rides couldn’t be taken. Haircuts couldn’t be paid for. If only something existed, something physical, that might have facilitated a transaction of goods and services.

Keep both credit cards and cash ready

Of course, there’s no need for such flippancy. We’re all too busy running head first into the matrix like compliant lemmings, waving our glowing phones watches in the air like every day is the last song at a Taylor Swift concert.

According to a 2023 survey published by Statista, Singapore’s adoption rate of cashless payments is the highest in Southeast Asia at 97 per cent. Digital wallets are predicted to overtake credit cards as the most popular online payment method in Singapore by 2026, according to a 2023 report by financial technology company FIS.

The cashless society is an inevitability, apparently. Really? Seniors are still struggling to embrace the technology and tight-fisted tourists like me would rather be considered a cashed-up drug dealer than risk daylight robbery with those “international charges”. Maybe there’s a compromise.

Ironically, the Zoomers and the Boomers are meeting in the middle on this issue, with something called cash stuffing. On TikTok, creators are #cashstuffing by counting out their physical notes into different envelopes to give them a tactile experience of what their spending budget literally looks like. The phenomenon has gone viral.

But cash stuffing isn’t a TikTok trend. It’s my late grandmother shoving pennies into a plastic money box. There’s no real difference between a TikToker counting out money into piles and my grandmother doing likewise, except one got a billion views and the other completed her count by performing a French dance and flashing her knickers.

More pertinently, neither of them would’ve gone hungry during a banking disruption.

I’ve sat through too many videos of TikTok cash stuffers treating dollar bills like sex objects in a frankly disturbing ASMR exercise and you’ve been left with the disturbing image of my late grandmother flashing her knickers, again, only to learn something that we both already knew. Maintain different payment options.

Cash stuffers and cashless swipers do not have to behave like singles on a night out with the Social Development Network. They can intermingle. Keep the credit cards and flirt with the cash. Or the other way round. It doesn’t really matter, as long as there are choices.

When the cashless systems failed, the brief panic really showed the consequences of putting the tech before common sense. Singapore has so many existential threats to be going on with; its citizens not having five bucks in their collective pockets shouldn’t be one of them.

Keep calm and carry some cash, just enough to eat in a coffee shop, but not enough to be called a drug dealer in a British supermarket.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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