Money At Your Finger Tips

From digital wallets to NFC payments, Money has gone digital and now it's set to invade you - literally

- Arnab Mukherjee

Be it due to demonetisation or sheer tech savviness, we’ve started using digital payments a lot more off late. Even offline payments – where you complete otherwise offline transactions via digital means – have picked up pace. If you were to visit the Digit test labs you’d hardly see any physical bills lying around. We have innovations on the payments front to thank for that. Overall, it is obvious that digital payments owe their popularity to their ease of use, constant availability, and better security in the present day scenario. But there’s more to that story than meets the eye.

Cash killer

The barter system had existed for, well, as long as people needed stuff that other people had. Quite obviously, a time came in every market system where the people involved collectively realised that the mutual need required for barter was a hindrance to trade. In came the concept of money – something that everyone would be willing to accept in exchange. Explains why salt and cocoa beans were accepted as valid tender at one point of time.

Over time, as technology progressed to a point where things were becoming faster, smaller and easier in every aspect of life, carrying around huge wads of cash to complete transactions became cumbersome. That is where technology stepped in and brought humanity on the road to digital payments. Today, we see huge volumes of digital transactions. According to a BCG report, in 2016, the total value of digital transactions was roughly 411 trillion USD, which is roughly equivalent to every person on the planet ordering a vadapav every 90 seconds for the entire year. Kind of takes care of the hunger problem, doesn’t it?

Well Carded