This does not yet account for the losses relating to under-reported taxes which is directly enabled by a cash economy – a cost borne by society as a whole. A 2005 study estimated this figure to be USD100 billion annually in the United States alone The task of calculating the relative total cost of cash and cashless payments is a difficult one. Apart from the methodological challenges, the findings for each study are also likely to differ according to the nuances of each country. Nonetheless it is a worthwhile endeavour. Policy makers around the world have made positive progress in this area, and I believe we will see more efforts on this front in the coming years. This leads to another dimension of the social cost consideration, which is the impact on financial inclusion. Millions of people live in rural areas globally, with little or no access to the modern infrastructures necessary to facilitate cashless solutions. The availability of cash is therefore paramount in ensuring that they continue to be seamlessly included in the financial system. At the same time, the success of mobile payments operator M-Pesa in rural Kenya has demonstrated that cashless alternatives can in fact be a means to promote financial inclusion for the unbanked. Here in Malaysia, where mobile banking transactions have tripled in the past year, there is potential to leverage the high mobile penetration rate to improve financial inclusion. Stability The third element is stability.
Encik Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour: Optimal balance of paper and digital, cash and cashless; and next page for physical currency Welcoming address by Mr Encik Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Currency Conference 2017, Kuala Lumpur, 15 May 2017. * * * Mr Richard Haycock, Chairman, Currency Research, Fellow central bankers, Distinguished participants. A very good morning and a warm Selamat Datang to Malaysia. Paper lives on A lot has changed in the past 10 years. In May 2007, there was no such thing as a smartphone. Tablets did not exist, and the human race had not discovered the fast-expanding universe of mobile apps. Back then, we read the news by leafing through the pages of a large newspaper. We listened to music with CDs, and bought or rented DVDs to watch movies. Today, most of these are streamed through internet devices. When e-book sales increased by over 1,000% in the two years leading up to 2010, many questioned the future of the printed book. The bankruptcy of Borders in the United States the following year solidified these fears. Similarly, there has been much hype about the end of cash. This has been sparked by the rising use of e-payments and the recent proliferation of digital currencies in an increasingly virtual world. However, just as physical books continue to enjoy increasing sales, we have seen cash in circulation rise in many countries, quicker than their GDP growth for some.