Cash is not dead but gains more vigor after the worst of Covid-19 has passed. The pandemic considerably reduced the use of physical money in favor of 'plastic' but now the trend has changed. According to a Denaria survey, carried out by Gad3, 46,3% of Spaniards have cash as the most used payment method or with which they feel most comfortable in their day to day. This is five points more than in last year's study, when the pandemic was still very present.
Despite everything, the credit objectives or the continuous flow monopolize the statistics: 48,3% of those surveyed have them as the most used system. Mobile payment, for its part, only appears as the preferred method for 3.6%, which is eight tenths less than in the report prepared last year, but it is a drop that falls within the margin of error of the study.
By age groups, young people between 18 and 29 years old have a preference for 'plastic' with 59,6% of those surveyed; those between 30 and 44 years old follow the same pattern (56,9%); the trend is almost reversed between 45 and 64 years, where the most used method (50,4%) continues to be the card, although it is closely followed by cash (45,8%); and, finally, those aged 65 or over have physical money as their predominant system (67,7%).
Thus, seven out of ten (73%) respondents indicate that cash is important in their daily transactions, compared to 68,6% last year. A percentage that rises to 82,7% in the case of the oldest. And that importance is given to it, in part, for several reasons: because of the lower risk of fraud, because it helps control expenses, because it defends privacy and because it is a means of payment that always works. Even so, respondents indicate that it is increasingly difficult to access physical money. 56,8% maintained that position.
This loss of access translates into opportunities for financial exclusion, a problem that the Government and banks have been working to tackle in recent months. Eight out of ten considered, thus, that there is financial exclusion in Spain, and nine out of ten considered that office closures arise from the access and use of cash.
