But digitalization is two-faced: it can emphasize some behavioral biases, such as short-termism and impatience, but could nudge people into specific virtuous action. The final balance will be positive only if consumers are financially literate. Building a sound financial education is complex, as it requires a long-life approach on three challenging dimensions: knowledge, attitude, and behavior.
Such an economy will naturally generate a large quantity of foreign exchange transactions with at least one leg in the home currency to support its wide-ranging business activity. This factor evidently goes a long way toward explaining the dominance of the Dutch guilder in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British pound in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the dollar today.