BofE launches cash vs cashless challenge

BofE needs to avoid the Brexit situation whereby people form wrong opinions on the basis of insufficient information.

I tried something similiar once.  Remember Proton, an Electronic Purse deployed in Belgium.  I loaded an equivalent sum of money on it and also took out cash.  I did not go get more cash, until I had spent both forms of money.  It was a painful experience. 

Acceptance is the key.  We are now at a time where Merchants are saying no to Cash while other merchants are still saying no to Cards.  We then have Cryptocurrencies and other disruptive forms emerging.  We are confusing Means of Payment with Methods of Payment. 

For me:

Means are Currency (cash) in Hand, Credit Lines and Funds on Account (deposits). 

Methods are Cards, Checks, Wires, ACH, Notes and Coins and all these new methods people are promoting.

@Philip Andreae:

Very insightful comment, indeed!

In the India of today, your experiment will have a resounding success. For purchases, it's possible to survive only on cash and equally well only on cashless method of payments (MOPs). So far, no merchant refuses cash. Many mom-and-pop stores do hesitate to accept cashless MOPs but it's always possible pay with cashless MOPs to buy the same goods from organized retail chains in the metro areas and ecommerce websites in many more areas. When it comes to P2P / A2A, cash of course works but we also have three core rails that support near realtime cashless payments 24/7/365 (NEFT, IMPS, RTGS) and at least a dozen overlay products that run off of these three core rails (e.g. PayTM, PayZapp, BHIM UPI). Ditto bill payments.

I totally agree that there's a massive confusion between what you call Means and what I've been calling "funding sources" and MOPs. At the height of the mobile wallet hype 5-7 years ago, I remember shouting from the rooftop to whoever would listen to me that mobile wallets that save credit cards digitally could only hope to kill the plastic form factor / MOP but not the underlying credit card funding source. Of course, mobile wallets haven't even managed to kill plastic yet, but that's a story for another day. 

Correction: PayTM is not only an overlay product as I mentioned above but also a core rail, just that it's closed loop. It has 250M consumers and supports a parallel acquirer network that covers 8 million Merchants, which is 3X of that covered by open loop card networks. Thanks to PayTM, a number of mom-and-pop stores have also started accepting cashless MOP.