The intermediaries and infrastructure that are required depend on which means of payment is chosen. It is therefore very relevant to talk about payments as a consumption of payment services. An efficiently-functioning market for payment services assumes that payment services meet certain important requirements. Three important requirements of retail payment services Firstly, the payment service must be safe, but this is not enough. It must also be perceived as safe. Both the payer and the payee must feel secure, otherwise the payment service will not be used. If banknotes are easy to counterfeit, shops will not want to accept them. If cards can be easily hijacked, consumers will not want to pay with them.1 When we pay by other means than cash, security also means that we rely on the mediator of payments that we have actually entrusted with our money. Secondly, the payment service must be useful. It must be simple and convenient. You may remember when a card payment was made using a paper slip, with carbon in between, where you filled in the amount and signed it and showed your ID. This was not as simple and easy as the chip and PIN code in today’s card terminals. Thirdly, payment services must be accessible to households and accepted by companies and public authorities.
Trends and changes Sweden is in the forefront I said earlier that Sweden is in the forefront with regard to using other payment services than cash, and this is illustrated in this chart, which summarises the situation in a few selected countries.5 The picture that appears is that use of cash is much lower in Sweden than in most other countries and that the use of cards, primarily bank cards, is higher. The situation is roughly the same in our Nordic neighbour countries. I mentioned earlier that Sweden is a technology-friendly country. We have an extensive infrastructure for telecommunications and a high percentage of households have Internet in their homes, are familiar with technology and have smart phones and tablets. Moreover, there is a high degree of confidence and trust between households, companies, payment intermediaries and public authorities. This chart shows an aggregate of all of these factors. It is the World Economic Forum’s ranking of countries according to how well they are situated  5  If we look at cards and cash, it is unfortunately difficult to find good and comparable statistics. The information on other countries than Sweden is often a few years old, and the exact percentages should be taken with a pinch of salt. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  with regard to utilising possibilities offered by information and communication technology. We can see that Sweden is highly placed and has been for a long time. Of course, this creates the right conditions for the payments market to develop.