Worldpay: cash will make up 14% of transactions in Asia by 2027, down from 49% in 2019, driven by the adoption of QR codes and other smartphone-based payments
Nikkei Asia : Bluesky: @lorak Bluesky: Lora Kolodny / @lorak : cash is still awesome. but. it's going extinct possibly. [embedded post]
Context & Ripple Effects
This projection extends a long-running shift from cash toward mobile wallets: earlier coverage described China's rapid mobile-payments adoption and later found that mobile wallets had become the most widely used payment method, with Southeast Asia the fastest-growing region as wallet use accelerated in Southeast Asia.
The significance is the scale of the projected change across Asia. It makes QR-based and other smartphone-led payment rails central to everyday checkout rather than a supplementary option.
First-order effects
- QR-code and smartphone-payment providers stand to gain transaction volume as cash's share of Asian payments falls toward Worldpay's projected level.
- Merchants and payment acquirers will place greater value on accepting interoperable digital-payment methods, while the role of cash handling in checkout declines.
Second-order effects
- Banks, card networks, and wallet operators face sharper competition for the transaction relationship as QR-led payments expand, increasing pressure to improve acceptance, user experience, and merchant economics.
- Payment processors such as Worldpay have a stronger incentive to connect merchants to local wallet and QR-payment rails, not solely card-based acceptance.
Third-order effects
- If this trajectory holds, Asia's payment infrastructure will be organized increasingly around smartphone-based rails, making control of merchant acceptance and consumer wallet distribution more consequential.
- The shift could also concentrate bargaining power in the payment platforms and local rails that achieve broad acceptance, though the outcome will depend on interoperability and merchant choice.
The trend: Cash is being displaced by mobile-first payment rails, with QR acceptance turning smartphones into a primary point-of-sale interface across Asian markets.