Gary Cohn, former Director of the U.S. National Economic Council, writes in the FT that the current crisis could help speed up the shift to cashless societies; Cohn writes, “The coronavirus pandemic, and our efforts to cut disease transmission, is forcing us to ask whether we have outgrown the need to carry and move money in physical form. We already have the technology to pay and transact in a purely digital fashion and use highly secure biometric authentication at the point of transaction.”; U.S. lawmakers recently debated including a digital dollar in one of the stimulus packages which would help to establish digital wallets for everyone; there has been a growing shift across the world to move to a more cashless society, though there are a number of problems that come with this plan; most notably the underbanked and how to avoid leaving them behind as they are the most reliant on cash and coin; central banks would need to take the lead to avoid private solutions leaving large segments of people out in the cold; the one thing the crisis has done is push the digital currency movement further to the front of the line. Financial Times
