The important alternatives to cash are charge cards (or credit cards) and Cash cards. Charge cards and credit cards currently account for more than one quarter of all transactions, which is a lower figure than for the other Nordic countries. With regard to purely electronic money, there is currently only a national issue in Sweden, and that is the Cash card. This project involves every bank issuing its own e-money that is downloaded into a chip in the respective bank’s charge card or credit card. The Cash system has not yet attained sufficient critical mass to become accepted, which also applies to the corresponding systems in other countries. Perhaps the old cash and new charge cards offer too good substitutes. In this context it may be interesting to note one aspect of how cash is distributed. The dominant quantity of withdrawals is through ATMs, but the ATM network in Sweden differs considerably from the networks in other countries. In Sweden we have only approximately 300 ATMs per million inhabitants; in Europe only Greece and Turkey have fewer. On the other hand, we have by far the largest number of transactions per ATM. We thus have fewer ATMs, but use them more. This ATM structure is probably due primarily to the fact that the banks have placed their ATMs by bank offices and only there. In many other countries, cash dispensers are located in shopping centres and other places where people are active, regardless of the location of bank offices.
We must all be able to pay our bills in a secure manner, preferably also in a simple and speedy manner, i.e. we must know that the  BIS Review 51/2002  1  party to which we are sending money actually receives it. There are many countries in the world where this does not function and this is as much of an obstacle to development as when roads and railways do not function. The banks are the institutions that handle the major part of the payments. It is because they are so important to the financial sector that they are subject to such comprehensive legislation and that they are the companies most closely monitored by Finansinspektionen (the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority). We may have views on how the banks should set charges, handle their customers and so on, but without them our lives would certainly be more complicated. In this context it is worth noting how much IT in a broad sense has helped the banks to develop and simply means of payment. It is not so long ago that one received a weekly wage in the form of a brown envelope containing banknotes, handed out on a Friday afternoon. Nowadays our wages are paid directly into our bank accounts and we receive notice of this in a bank statement. Nor do we have to go very far to pay our bills; we can sit at our desks and fill out giro forms or - even easier - pay through the computer.