Could the railway cease accepting cash?

[Bletchleyite]

The move to a cashless society has profound implications for beggars too...

It might force peoples' hands on properly dealing with the issue. Begging is not a desirable thing; we have to as a society find a better way to deal with people in that position.

 

[kristiang85]

The move to a cashless society has profound implications for beggars too...

I've seen a beggar in London with a card machine!

 

[Roger100]

Supermarkets do, certainly Morrisons and Tesco anyway. Twice in the last two years I have seen manual payments taken when the systems were down. The checkout queues were a mile long!

This is why Oyster has transformed London buses. It takes about a second to pay your fare. Many times I have been waiting for buses with a large crowd of nearly 100 people. When the bus turns up they just pour in to the merry bleeping of Oyster terminals, especially on Boris Buses where there are three doors with terminals. If cash was required the whole process would take ages. With Oyster the whole boarding process is automated, and all the driver has to do is deal with the very few people who don't have a valid card.

It's similar on TfL trains, no messing with ticket machines or booking office queues. You just touch in and out, the system works out the cheapest fare. TfL minimise fare-dodging by manning all stations from the first to last train. For those worried about being tracked, Oyster can be completely anonymous, you can buy the cards and top up with cash at ticket machines, which will also handle refunds too.

I currently buy all my train tickets online, and collect them at any convenient station. Discounts and advance tickets could easily be loaded remotely onto a card, so I wouldn't need to go to the station to collect the physical ticket. There might be an issue with reservations though.

 

[Llanigraham]

You are talking increasingly niche situations, though. How often do you get a power outage at home of any significant length? I can't recall when I last did.

Lucky you, but then you don't live in a rural area.
I can assure you that total power outages are not uncommon in some areas.

 

[Llanigraham]

Surely if the power was down in a bad storm then no shops would be open anyway?

Why wouldn't they be open?

 

[Esker-pades]

This is why Oyster has transformed London buses. It takes about a second to pay your fare. Many times I have been waiting for buses with a large crowd of nearly 100 people. When the bus turns up they just pour in to the merry bleeping of Oyster terminals, especially on Boris Buses where there are three doors with terminals. If cash was required the whole process would take ages. With Oyster the whole boarding process is automated, and all the driver has to do is deal with the very few people who don't have a valid card.

My emphasis.
And TfL loose ~£40,000 per week from fare evasion on the NBFLs (New Bus For London aka Boris Bus) through people boarding at the back and not touching their Oyster or Contactless card.

 

[_toommm_]

Logically the limit should be the same as the card with PIN, as verified using a fingerprint they are more, not less, secure, and verified using a PIN the level of security is about the same. They are also not in any way vulnerable to cloning unlike a card.

The theoretical limit is £10,000 - although if someone tried to pay for that much without an actual card I would be wary personally..

 

[Bald Rick]

My emphasis.
And TfL loose ~£40,000 per week from fare evasion on the NBFLs (New Bus For London aka Boris Bus) through people boarding at the back and not touching their Oyster or Contactless card.

No doubt they do. But they will save a lot more by having to spend precisely nothing on cash handling, and more again by needing fewer buses to handle the same number of punters if they all paid cash.

 

[dubscottie]

Most benefits are paid into bank accounts. Almost all employers only pay through BACS. The main people who will be affected by a move away from cash are those doing "cash in hand" work and not declaring it to HMRC!

Here in Ireland most benefits went back to cash from the post office as a major fraud was uncovered involving thousands of Eastern Europeans.

Cashless and paperless is not all its cracked upto be.

In my job we will refuse entry to people that have a picture of a ticket on a phone. They must have a physical piece of paper. Just because something can be done with "tech" does not mean it should.

There are plenty of tech solutions to problems that don't exist. Cashless being one.

 

[lewisf]

The theoretical limit is £10,000 - although if someone tried to pay for that much without an actual card I would be wary personally..

Not true, someone bought an Aston Martin using Apple Pay - https://www.cultofmac.com/450133/apple-pay-used-buy-1-million-aston-martin-db5/

 

[maniacmartin]

I have never, ever had a direct debit go wrong, but if it does the Direct Debit Guarantee requires the bank to repay it straight away and without question.

I can't let this go unchallenged. I have had Direct Debits go wrong 3 times.
The first time was the council taking my council tax twice by mistake. The bank wasn't interested in honouring their side of the guarantee, and the best the council could come up with was cancelling the last monthly payment of the year to make it balance out (which happened to be 11 months in the future).

The other 2 times have been Vodafone whose internal records had a very different idea of the verbal contract I entered into in store (custom negotiated deal). Conveniently for them my copy of the contract was meant to arrive by email and never showed up... Salesman trying to hit commission targets maybe. Again the bank (a different bank this time) wasn't interested as I had nothing in writing showing the amount, and the Direct Debit mandate I'd signed didn't specify a specific amount.

So I claim the Direct Debit guarantee is worthless and I now pay utility companies manually by BACS/FPS. It's just less hassle to sort out mistakes when you're in control of the money

 

[sheff1]

Oyster and contactless are particularly good on buses. The £1.50 taken from the card on your first journey is valid for all bus journeys in the following hour. It would be rather difficult to do this with cash!

Why ? A ticket bought with cash in many cities is valid for unlimited travel on bus, tram, train, metro, boats etc during the next xx mins and that has been the case for as long as I can remember (which is rather a long time !).

 

[The Ham]

I see your latter point, but your 10 year old daughter could have a GoHenry card or similar; they are available from age 6 and above.



It's cost but offset by (volunteer) time. As a Scout Group we have moved to Online Scout Manager for most of our transactions. It costs us 2.95% per transaction, but the time and frustration saved to allow volunteers to do something more useful than faffing around with cash and cheques is immeasurable. Surely a church would be very similar. OK, the traditional collection wouldn't work so well, but I'm sure alternative methods could work.

Paying cash in is a pain, especially if you have to travel to a town to do so, some banks won't deal with coins at a weekend, etc.

Most people can be persuaded to use bank transfers for regular giving, leaving the total fees for the small amount wanting to give instead of cash at a card reader as a relatively small figure (I admit not zero but possibly close to 0.1%).

Even then there's advantages, in that there's likely to be other times a card reader would be useful (i.e. fundraising event, paying for ticketed events, etc.)

 

[Pigeon]

There is a limit to what kinds of bank account an undischarged bankrupt can hold, but they can hold a basic bank account with a number of banks, and they can certainly hold a pre-paid debit card as that is not legally a bank account.

Nobody can "certainly" hold a pre-paid debit card.

Typical experience of trying to get a pre-paid debit card:

Go to website that lists hundreds of the things.
Cross out all the ones that charge you regular fees even if you don't do anything with them and/or exhibit other arsulous behaviour of a similar kind.
Cross out all the ones that you can't put money on at the corner shop (which defeats the whole object).
Cross out all the ones that you have to pay to get hold of in the first place and you can't do that at the corner shop either.
That leaves about three options, so picking the cheapest is not difficult. (Unlike anything else about the whole affair.)
Fill in application form on website, hit "submit". Website redirects back to the form page with all fields blank again.
Poke through website's code to figure out what bloody stupid invalid assumption the moron who wrote it has made. Make observation that moron is of that ubiquitous ilk whose coding skills would be massively improved by stuffing their fingers into a lawnmower. Swear at the difficulty of bringing said improvement about.
Implement hack to fix stupid problem, re-submit form.
Receive email that says all I have to do now is pay the initial fee and the card will be with me as soon as the post will let it.
Go to corner shop and pay for wee snotrag with magic number on it.
Plug GSM modem into USB port of PC. Attempt to send SMS of magic number.
Go back to corner shop and pay for another wee snotrag with a different magic number on it to reactivate the GSM modem.
Send SMS of magic number. Receive email that says the card is now on its way.
Wait a few days.
Receive email that says they have decided not to give me a card after all, for no reason.
Swear the place down about why couldn't they have told me that before I bloody paid for it.
Repeat with second-best option from shortlist. Get same result.
Can't try the sole remaining option. Haven't got enough money left now.
Post rant on twitter about money-handling methods designed and evangelised by people who have enough money not to have to worry about it and think everyone else is the same.

 

[Clip]

Why wouldn't they be open?

Maybe a big gigantic wave hit them and flooded them or a tree fell on the owner or so on and so forth

 

[paddington]

People seem to be mixing up "cashless" on London buses versus "cashless" in general.

Cash is used heavily in Turkey yet buses in Istanbul are cashless, in fact I believe the only way to buy an Istanbulkart is using cash.

The Hong Kong Octopus card is a cash card, the only way of loading it for the vast majority of people is with cash, so even though cash is rarely directly used to pay bus fares, the majority of bus fares are paid by cash. (The other method of loading is to have the financial status to be approved for one of 4 designated Hong Kong credit cards, then set up an automatic top up.) Octopus takes roughly 0.5% cut from every transaction, which is why taxis don't want to accept it. However, I don't know how much banks charge the bus companies to deposit their coins, probably 1%.

London buses only accepting Oyster or contactless is a good thing, but TfL is far from "cashless", practically every station has a machine that accepts cash. I frequently accept cash from people wanting to take buses in London but who have lost their Oyster or their bank card doesn't work or whatever.

As for the railway, from my travels around GB this summer, cash was the most frequent method of paying for tickets on board along lines where tickets are usually bought on board. Cash was also faster than using card in many cases, though the rate limiting step is the actual ticket issuance. At ticket offices and TVMs, card payment seemed to be the norm when I watched.

I don't know how TVMs work exactly, but I would have thought that when the amount of cash in a machine exceeds a threshold an alert would be sent out to get the cash collected, to reduce theft.

99.99% of people would be able to pay by card if the railway did not accept cash at all, but a lot more than 0.01% of people choose not to pay by card and I don't think it is helpful to label such people as "backward". I support having as many payment options as possible.

Cash is basically trust in the Central Bank of a country. The problem with Sweden is that everyone is in thrall to commercial banks, there were a few cases where new migrants had to be paid their salaries in cash because they couldn't satisfy account opening requirements. If the UK is to become "cashless" then the BOE must issue an alternative that does not depend on private companies. The Riksbank of Sweden has apparently been looking into this, although they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy on other issues.

 

[whhistle]

So monzo then - are other banks available as this one seems to be repeatedly mentioned not only in this thread but in others over and over again

It's a new type of bank.
No branches but from what I've read you can only draw out something like £250 cash per month before charges apply. However, their app is very, very good and shows transactions in real time rather than delayed like other banks.

It's certainly peaked my interest.

Not that rare an occurrence, more so outside the major towns and cities where the infrastructure isn't up to standard. We still don't have a decent 3g coverage in our village and broadband is still pretty slow.

With all respect, you're a consumer, not a business.
Think about the last time a railway station lost power for a significant amount of time?
The last time it happened, the staion didn't care about selling tickets.
The customers paid on the train.
It's still a rare occurance - the question is whether it's worth the cost of maintaining cash (thinking about banking vans collecting cash, vandalism to machines, maintenance on said machines...)
Perhaps going cashless would even push infrastructure managers to up their game for mobile signals.

So I claim the Direct Debit guarantee is worthless and I now pay utility companies manually by BACS/FPS. It's just less hassle to sort out mistakes when you're in control of the money

But how many direct debits are there that work seemlessly every time?
I have at least 7 - none have ever given me a problem.
So against your three, I'm still 4 good ones up.

 

[James H]

No branches but from what I've read you can only draw out something like £250 cash per month before charges apply.

With Monzo there are no charges for ATM withdrawals in the UK.

It's overseas ATM withdrawals that have a £200 / month threshold before fees apply.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It's a new type of bank.
No branches but from what I've read you can only draw out something like £250 cash per month before charges apply. However, their app is very, very good and shows transactions in real time rather than delayed like other banks.

It's certainly peaked my interest.

As has been said the cash withdrawal limit is for international transactions only.

If you use a smartphone it's well worth getting an account and having a play, it doesn't have to be your main account (though it now is mine now), there is no minimum deposit requirement like most current accounts have. At present the only thing that will incur substantial charges is if you take an overdraft.

For balance there is another similar one called Starling, which I also tried, but I found Monzo a bit better, both in terms of the account itself and in terms of their approach as a company.

 

[Bald Rick]

I can't let this go unchallenged. I have had Direct Debits go wrong 3 times.
The first time was the council taking my council tax twice by mistake. The bank wasn't interested in honouring their side of the guarantee, and the best the council could come up with was cancelling the last monthly payment of the year to make it balance out (which happened to be 11 months in the future).

The other 2 times have been Vodafone whose internal records had a very different idea of the verbal contract I entered into in store (custom negotiated deal). Conveniently for them my copy of the contract was meant to arrive by email and never showed up... Salesman trying to hit commission targets maybe. Again the bank (a different bank this time) wasn't interested as I had nothing in writing showing the amount, and the Direct Debit mandate I'd signed didn't specify a specific amount.

So I claim the Direct Debit guarantee is worthless and I now pay utility companies manually by BACS/FPS. It's just less hassle to sort out mistakes when you're in control of the money

Unfortunate, and no doubt happened to others (although not me in 30 years of using DD).

However you still use a cashless system. It’s not so long ago that most people paid their utility bills in cash at a bank or post office, no doubt some still do, but I should imagine it’s a small minority and shrinking fast.

Personally, I use cash about once a month. Every retailer I use takes contactless. It’s just a matter of time before some major retailers stop accepting cash - I suspect it will be someone like M&S or
John Lewis who goes first. The railway will surely follow.

 

[yorksrob]

It's a new type of bank.
No branches but from what I've read you can only draw out something like £250 cash per month before charges apply. However, their app is very, very good and shows transactions in real time rather than delayed like other banks.

It's certainly peaked my interest.




With all respect, you're a consumer, not a business.
Think about the last time a railway station lost power for a significant amount of time?
The last time it happened, the staion didn't care about selling tickets.
The customers paid on the train.
It's still a rare occurance - the question is whether it's worth the cost of maintaining cash (thinking about banking vans collecting cash, vandalism to machines, maintenance on said machines...)
Perhaps going cashless would even push infrastructure managers to up their game for mobile signals.




But how many direct debits are there that work seemlessly every time?
I have at least 7 - none have ever given me a problem.
So against your three, I'm still 4 good ones up.

They should maintain cash handling precisely because a significant proportion of customers want it.

One of the big problems with the economy today is that companies are so powerful, they feel entitled to arrange things for their own convenience, not their customers'.

 

[Clip]

The theoretical limit is £10,000 - although if someone tried to pay for that much without an actual card I would be wary personally..

People buy cars like this often i believe due to 0% interest rates on cards and such like

Go to website that lists hundreds of the things.
Cross out all the ones that charge you regular fees even if you don't do anything with them and/or exhibit other arsulous behaviour of a similar kind.
Cross out all the ones that you can't put money on at the corner shop (which defeats the whole object).
Cross out all the ones that you have to pay to get hold of in the first place and you can't do that at the corner shop either.
That leaves about three options, so picking the cheapest is not difficult. (Unlike anything else about the whole affair.)
Fill in application form on website, hit "submit". Website redirects back to the form page with all fields blank again.
Poke through website's code to figure out what bloody stupid invalid assumption the moron who wrote it has made. Make observation that moron is of that ubiquitous ilk whose coding skills would be massively improved by stuffing their fingers into a lawnmower. Swear at the difficulty of bringing said improvement about.
Implement hack to fix stupid problem, re-submit form.
Receive email that says all I have to do now is pay the initial fee and the card will be with me as soon as the post will let it.
Go to corner shop and pay for wee snotrag with magic number on it.
Plug GSM modem into USB port of PC. Attempt to send SMS of magic number.
Go back to corner shop and pay for another wee snotrag with a different magic number on it to reactivate the GSM modem.
Send SMS of magic number. Receive email that says the card is now on its way.
Wait a few days.
Receive email that says they have decided not to give me a card after all, for no reason.
Swear the place down about why couldn't they have told me that before I bloody paid for it.
Repeat with second-best option from shortlist. Get same result.
Can't try the sole remaining option. Haven't got enough money left now.
Post rant on twitter about money-handling methods designed and evangelised by people who have enough money not to have to worry about it and think everyone else is the same.

Looks like you are just making a mountain out of a molehill in getting a pre paid card. It really is quite simple

 

[Clip]

They should maintain cash handling precisely because a significant proportion of customers want it.

One of the big problems with the economy today is that companies are so powerful, they feel entitled to arrange things for their own convenience, not their customers'.

Seems in this instance the customers you mention are turning their backs on using cash so it seems they DO want the convenience offered to them with these new ways of paying no matter what you think people want

Debit card payments have overtaken cash as the most popular form of payment in the UK for the first time, according to banking industry figures.

Debit card payments have overtaken cash as the most popular form of payment in the UK for the first time, according to banking industry figures.

Consumers used their debit cards 13.2bn times last year, up 14% compared to 2016, according to a report by UK Finance, the trade body for the UK banking and financial services sector. The number of cash transactions fell by 15% to 13.1bn transactions in the same period.

Use of contactless payment cards almost doubled to 5.6bn transactions. Almost two-thirds (63%) of people in the UK now use contactless payments, which were first introduced a decade ago but were not initially popular. About 3.4m people almost never used cash, instead relying on cards.

Cash has been overtaken by card payments a year earlier than expected, as more smaller businesses embraced contactless and consumers got used to the speed and ease of “wave and pay” or “tap and go”. The rising popularity of online shopping was cited by the report as another factor for cash losing ground.

Advertisement
Gareth Shaw of the consumer group Which? said: “Clearly the way we shop and pay for services is changing but for millions of people in the UK cash still plays an essential role in their everyday lives. With bank branch closures on the rise and the UK’s free-to-use ATM network under threat, it’s vital these people are still able to access the cash they need.”

The average adult made 54 payments a month last year, 20 by debit card and 20 by cash, including nine contactless payments.

By the end of 2017 there were nearly 119m contactless cards in circulation, with 78% of debit cards and 62% of credit cards in Britain having contactless functionality.

Yet despite the fall, cash remains the second most frequently used payment method, accounting for just over a third (34%) of all payments. Around 2.2 million customers mainly used cash for their day-to-day shopping last year, even though nine out of 10 of them had a debit card, and the majority used other payment methods to pay their regular bills.

Cash use is expected to continue to fall in popularity over the coming decade. UK Finance predicted that cash will account for 6.4bn payments, or 16% of all transactions, in 2027. Contactless payment is forecast to account for 36% of the total, up from 15% in
2017

Stephen Jones, chief executive of UK Finance, said: “We’re far from becoming a cash-free society and despite the UK transforming to an economy where cash is less important than it once was, it will remain a payment method that continues to be valued and preferred by many.

“These trends are likely to shift further over the next decade. Developments such as Open Banking are expected to bring extensive changes to the payments landscape, something that will likely shape how we interact with our money in the coming years.”


Initially, “touch and go” was only offered by coffee shops and sandwich chains and was largely confined to London. The technology received a huge boost four years ago when it became possible for people travelling on the tube and most of London transport using a contactless card, rather than tickets or Oyster smartcards. But contactless been held back by people

Dont fight it
Be it

 

[yorksrob]

Seems in this instance the customers you mention are turning their backs on using cash so it seems they DO want the convenience offered to them with these new ways of paying no matter what you think people want

Some will want it, some won't. What you won't get is everyone wanting to give up cash.

 

[thenorthern]

A big problem I can see is the definition of "Legal Tender".

Contrary to popular belief Legal Tender doesn't mean it has to legally be accepted as legally a person or a company doesn't have to sell you anything but rather it Legal Tender means something that has to be accepted in settling a debt. The best example I have been told is at a restaurant where you pay before you order such as McDonalds (yes I know some people don't consider it a restaurant) can legally refuse to accept cash as you aren't in debt to them when you are paying but a restaurant where you get the bill at the end can't refuse cash to pay a bill as you are technically settling a debt to them.

The problem is people who board a train at an unstaffed station without a ticket and offered to pay by cash the TOC may face legal problems if the passenger wanted to pay by cash and the TOC refused, the same problem would happen if a passenger wanted to pay with cash if there was a revenue block at a station.

 

[whhistle]

With Monzo there are no charges for ATM withdrawals in the UK.

It's overseas ATM withdrawals that have a £200 / month threshold before fees apply.

As has been said the cash withdrawal limit is for international transactions only.

Oh!
I misread when looking into it. Thanks!
Interesting as I then started thinking when was the last time I drew out money from the account I'd replace with a Monzo... a very long time ago.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Oh!
I misread when looking into it. Thanks!
Interesting as I then started thinking when was the last time I drew out money from the account I'd replace with a Monzo... a very long time ago.

You might want to replace it with an interest paying savings account, then!

 

[Bletchleyite]

A big problem I can see is the definition of "Legal Tender".

Contrary to popular belief Legal Tender doesn't mean it has to legally be accepted as legally a person or a company doesn't have to sell you anything but rather it Legal Tender means something that has to be accepted in settling a debt. The best example I have been told is at a restaurant where you pay before you order such as McDonalds (yes I know some people don't consider it a restaurant) can legally refuse to accept cash as you aren't in debt to them when you are paying but a restaurant where you get the bill at the end can't refuse cash to pay a bill as you are technically settling a debt to them.

The problem is people who board a train at an unstaffed station without a ticket and offered to pay by cash the TOC may face legal problems if the passenger wanted to pay by cash and the TOC refused, the same problem would happen if a passenger wanted to pay with cash if there was a revenue block at a station.

One advantage of getting rid of cash is that you could avoid that debt being incurred by having TVMs at every station and a Metrolink style policy of telephoning for a reference number for a free journey if the TVM has failed (or to pay by card over the phone, perhaps). So the situation could be avoided. Everyone boarding then without a ticket would be subject to a PF, which could be paid after the event (on threat of prosecution if you don't) at another outlet rather than a station.

 

[Clip]

Some will want it, some won't. What you won't get is everyone wanting to give up cash.

You will be surprised that sooner or later they wont as everything will be done by phone or card - you can stomp your feet all you want about it but thats the truth whether you like it or not.

 

[Spartacus]

You will be surprised that sooner or later they wont as everything will be done by phone or card - you can stomp your feet all you want about it but thats the truth whether you like it or not.

I think you're misguided, I can't see most market stalls giving up cash for one.