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It is indeed sad, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 16, 2017 and three months later more than half of the island population was still without power and many people are still without access to potable water, a safe food supply and a method to transact other than cash. To be distributed water must be pumped, and pumps need electricity. Battery technology will not last for three months, stored value chip cards are almost non-existent in the USA, our Debit and Credit cards are online Chip and Signature (mostly). When grid power is down, no amount of generators are going to cut it because power is used to dispense fuel. No generator or transport can run, because batteries cannot be recharged, and petroleum based fuels cannot be distributed.  

How many miles can you drive with a single charge of your electric car, 250km? Then what?

Looking for a use case study for retaining cash, look to Puerto Rico.

Cash is the transaction method of last resort during periods of crisis or natural disaster. We noted in Florida, Peurto Rico, Houston in 2017, after the natural disasters that hit those areas, electronic payment methods were no longer available, access to bank accounts was cut off and cash,  (or barter) was the only way to purchase goods, pay for contactors to restore services, and to survive. If cash was not available during these periods of crisis, people would starve, power would not be quickly restored, infrustracture would not be rebuilt, and some citizens might die. 

My suggestion to SWIFT would be to implement a system using the card network PCI model. Institutions with low Dollar transfers could self certify, while high Dollar institutions would be externally audited.  This would pass the cost of an breach on to the Financial Institution that breaches minimum standards, which might put that FI out of business. A certified institution, might be able to mitigate the risk by having the SWIFT community accept some of the liability of a breach.

Actually the statistics show that we have about the same amount of people working as there were before the recession hit, but many more of them are working part-time. There are many work hours lost and wages at the lower end have largely stagnated.

However I am not sure we can correlate this with the additional automation or if it is a result of a flat economy.

Electronic transactions require ELECTRICIY, something that is not always available in India, even in the large cities. When the power fails, eCommerce stops. The only hedge agains power failure is cash.

There is a realistic chance of this succeeding as long as they can keep to political class at arms length.

Perhaps it is time for SWIFT to move it's base of operations out of the EU, perhaps to Switzerland?

Behind every prepaid debit card is an account in a bank. How is this starting a revolution in banking? All it is, is a white labled debit card, the same as every large store in the world offers?