Card payments

U.S. consumers paid credit card issuers $130 billion in interest and fees in 2022. In March, the Biden Administration curbed excessive credit card late fees.

While the use of cash has declined in Australia, many still rely on cash for payments, including seniors, lower-income households, migrants, and rural inhabitants.

Over the past few months, outages have brought down card payments in France (Wordline), Spain (Redsys), the U.K. (HSBC), Colombia (Bancaída), Uruguay (Fiserv) and now Australia (Wordline), to name but a few. Lloyds of London has warned that a major cyberattack on the global payments system could cost the world economy USD3.5 trillion. Can cash come to the rescue?

HSBC’s mobile and online services were out on Friday, November 24, causing dismay among customers relying on digital banking channels to conduct everyday transactions.

Outages in the RedSys platform brought down digital payments in much of Spain on November 18 and 23, raising questions about the vulnerability and resilience of the digital payments infrastructure.

Most Palestinians remain unbanked despite the Palestinian Monetary Authority’s efforts to promote digital payments. Cash withdrawals are the biggest component of e-wallet transactions in the West Bank and Gaza.

Many seniors and people living with disabilities find it easier to use cash as opposed to card and digital payments.

U.S. credit card balances hit over $1 trillion in June for the first time. Senator Richard J. Durbin introduced a bipartisan bill to lower credit card fees by increasing competition in processing networks.

Banks are closing 24-hour ATMs early in New York City for “safety and security” reasons. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects the OMNY contactless payment solution will reduce the amount of cash it gets from riders.

Card payments have regressive distributional effects: cash and debit card transactions subsidize credit card payments, and credit cardholders tend to be higher-income consumers.

U.S. credit card debt rose at its highest rate since 1999 in the third trimester of 2022. Most of the increase occurred amid younger and less wealthy cardholders.

Despite the massive adoption of mobile payments in China, cash in circulation grew rapidly in 2022.