How COVID-19 is accelerating the path to a cashless society

The usage of checks and cash has been in a decline for quite some time, and that trend has continued over the last four years. With the growing usage of credit and debit cards, as well as the growth of fintech, cash is becoming more and more obsolete. In recent years, fintech payment platforms such as venmo, paypal, and cashapp have contributed greatly to the growth of digital banking payments in Ireland and around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic created a new demand for these type of payments, as many businesses required contactless payments and online commerce greatly increased. The latest figures from BPFI’s payment monitor reflect this growing shift in payment methods. 

 

On March 15th 2021, Banking and Payments Federation Ireland published the figures from the BPFI Payments Monitor for the fourth quarter of 2020. The data showed a 67% increase in online/mobile banking between 2016 and 2020. It is also interesting to note that in the same four year period, check usage was cut in half. In fact, check usage fell to only 4.8 million in …

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TV3 The Morning Show: Health Insurance, Car Insurance, Credit Unions

We were talking about health insurance, car insurance and credit unions this month on TV3’s personal finance slot. On health insurance in particular we highlighted that you don’t have to go from ‘having cover’ to having zero cover, instead you could opt for the likes of the Hospital Saturday Fund which is a cash plan (pays out on health related spending but isn’t like regular insurance).

Car insurance was also a topic – the new EU ruling will make it illegal to rate men and women differently based on their sex alone from 21st December this year.

Credit Unions were (and are) in the news because of problems they are having. We’ll be back with TV3 next month for more!

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Who gets the best deals on insurance? (depends who you ask!)

The Financial Regulator regularly does ‘cost surveys’ to help the Irish public determine what the best deals are on the market, it would seem that in some cases they are actually driving people directly to certain insurers because they don’t survey the whole market! Indeed, as this weeks Sunday Times article by Niall Brady shows, Brokers were able to beat the ‘best price’ quoted by the regulator in almost every example, and it wasn’t only by a few cent either! In one case it was about €500 per annum, and in many others it was €100 p.a. – now on the other hand, if a broker went and made a person pay that much more than they had to then they’d be lynched, but when the regulator does it’s just an ‘oversight’… Quis costodiet ipsos custodes? Click on the picture below if you want to see a larger more readable version of it.

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The errors of compensation

One of the most pointed arguments that we hear about is that of bankers pay, some people have even started to refer to them as ‘banksters’ instead of ‘gangsters’. The reality is that both the industry and the shareholders and everybody else got it terribly wrong, even the corporations with their internal and agent remuneration models got it wrong. We were rewarding short termism in a long term game, something akin to having a footballer who has to play the full 90 mins but we base all their pay on the first five minutes.

On one hand the general mass of decision makers didn’t see the financial crisis coming, granted, there were some who were shouting it from rooftops, in some cases those same people have predicted 15 of the last 2 market meltdowns (our most well known one began calling it from late 1999), with others they were just plain ignored. The best analogy I have heard so far came compliments of a very respected colleague with over 40 years of banking experience …

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