A recent ECB study estimated the private cost of cash payments to be 1.1% of GDP on average in the participating countries.6 The unit social cost was estimated at 2.3 cents per euro of transaction. This is substantially higher than the unit social cost of a credit transfer or other non-cash means of payments per euro of transaction.
Because the overnight unsecured money market alone currently involves hundreds of banks with an aggregate transaction volume of around € 40–50 billion every day, replicating this scale of transacting with physical money would be a formidable and costly task, both privately and socially.