Amidst all the talk of electronic payments, cash still rules.
During my recent trip to Vietnam, the importance of cash was reiterated, digital platform are still not close to reaching cash’s biggest strength, easy of acceptability and interoperability. The first thing I had to do before traveling was buy USD, upon landing in the country I paid the visa fee in cash and that was the starting point to a 10 day cash life. From taking an Uber to ordering food, to accommodation it was all cash. My biggest incentive for not using a card was avoidance of FX fee. Since FX rate is known only post the transaction. Also what I observed was, most businesses preferred cash over card a known behaviour across most geographies. From India’s perspective most tourist I meet here prefer cash, for the above reasons and there is no viable global option. A thought I had Probably networks like Mastercard and Visa need to create products along with banks, where a user can create a virtual currency account linked to their existing credit/debit card,