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Comment by tyfon | Hacker News Reader

I work in a bank and cash handling is a major headache in terms of internal control, logistics, reconciliation and AML. It's a large extra cost.

It is much cheaper for the bank and customers to use cards, but where I live the banks own a payment network that does not involve visa and mastercard so the cost is much lower and there is no rent seeking so card use have no fees.

We also have an app for sending "cash" for free to friends, family and businesses that under the hood are just instant bank payments between the accounts.

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The issue is, whilst I’m sure that cards are cheaper overall, they present a serious burden for people who can’t use them: unbanked people for various reasons, older people, children etc.

Children and old people here all use cards or apps.

And derisking is illegal, so you have to provide a bank account and cards to anyone who wants. The high risk customers just need more follow-up on terms of AML.

Where are you based where derisking is illegal? Here in the UK it makes the news fairly frequently when someone notable becomes unbanked because of CIFAS or SARs or similar.

Also, I wasn’t able to get a debit card until I was 12, but perhaps that has changed over the past few decades.

I live in Norway.

My kids got a card at around 5, but they are older now. Not with visa/mastercard of course :)

Sounded like Italy. Same exact situation. The interbank payment consortium even created a cashless payment system called “Satispay” that lots of consumers and small retail businesses use on a daily basis.

Hmm in Finland it seems there is "Basic" card. Which I think is technically just more limited VISA debit card. Preventing such things as overdrafts.

Every EU country is required to have laws providing for some level of basic account.

It rarely makes the news and it happens all the time, but usually because people don't see fraud as criminal until it catches up with them.

I'm in the UK, and while regular banks don't generally provide debit cards at low age, providers like Go Henry specializes in accounts for kids with built in parental controls from age 6. They are effectively prepaid visa cards with app access for parents to top up instantly.

With respect to closing accounts, there are extremely few cases where people can be denied a basic account with the largest banks, but most smaller banks are not required to provide a basic account, and other account types can be denied at will, and most people have other accounts types (there are something like 7 million basic accounts).

If you’re homeless (and esp. if lacking ID), getting a bank account is a pretty tall order.

Cash is not illegal here, in fact shops are required by law to also accept cash.

However the homeless problem is virtually non existent in this country, same with the lack of id.

It's just so much more convenient to use digital payments that almost nobody use cash anymore.

Discussions like this on reddit/HN always get stuck in this loop of people projecting how things are in their part of the world onto the rest of the world and assuming everyone has the same problems/challenges/tradeoffs.

Older people/Children are not a problem. I've seen both using digital payments for a long time.

Unbanked people is more concerning, as unbanked people include political enemies of the state. The centralisation of power that digital payments allow is concerning.

The other thing which isn't mentioned in this comment chain is that a reason credit is cheaper is that your transaction data is harvested.

Some quote! "I work in a bank and cash handling is a major headache". Doubtless but perhaps we should reconsider the larger purposes of the banks in relation to their customers.

The biggest reason for banks to exist is too provide "grease" for the economy, i.e. to connect people with money to people who needs to borrow :)

Most banks here don't handle the actual payments themselves except the biggest ones.

The small "savings banks" like the one I work in doesn't have shareholders either, they are owned by the depositors. Almost every small town and community here has one.

The most valuable service banks provide is not just "matchmaking" lenders with borrowers (an exchange of some sort can do that much more cheaply) or even spreading credit risk across a pool of borrowers (again there are other ways to do that which are cheaper), but maturity transformation: depositors can lend money to the bank which is repayable on demand, but the banks' borrowers are given set repayment schedules.

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