This is the second to champion money, says LEE BOYCE

Oh how the tables have turned. After years of being mollycoddled into paying for goods and services in the form of card transactions, cash and its importance have taken centre stage.

Last week, the fragility of the global financial payments system was highlighted in one fell swoop.

One of the worst IT disasters unfolded in double quick time, meaning many shops, restaurants and supermarkets couldn’t take card payments.

For me, it felt like a ‘told you so,’ moment. Years of banging the drum about the importance of keeping cash and the occasional ridicule faced for believing in keeping it alive.

‘Waitrose is a warzone,’ my wife reported on Friday morning after popping to the store in Billericay. ‘It’s gone old school, only accepting cash – do you know what’s going on?’

She had cash in her purse. Indeed, we both always carry cash with us for several reasons.

Firstly, IT meltdowns and bank outages aren’t uncommon. Much of the infrastructure used is now decades out of date, with many moving parts and creaking patches everywhere.

I’ve reported on bank outages for years – and who can forget that epic Visa meltdown in 2018. Human error and computer problems can happen on a grand scale.

John Howells, chief executive of Link explained to me: ‘After many years of seeing signs in shops encouraging customers to pay with card, it was perhaps a shock for many in stores like Waitrose and Gail’s that it was cash-only for a time.

‘Payment systems such as Link, Visa and Mastercard performed well but that doesn’t help if other parts of IT like the tills aren’t working properly.

‘It shows that much more needs to be done to make sure that the technology that we all rely on is robust and we cannot safely go cashless unless and until we are sure of that.’

Secondly, I like to take some cash out on payday. I use it as float money for having fun, my untracked, off-grid spending and it appears cash is coming back from the dead, even before last week’s madness.

Indeed, 1.5million adults used cash as their main spending method last year, according to new UK Finance data – the first rise since 2019.

It says this can be attributed to the cost of living crisis, with more people choosing cash to budget. Just 900,000 used coins and notes as their primary spending method in 2022.

But its future is still not guaranteed. Cash use dropped last year to make up 12 per cent of all payments – and UK Finance says 22million adults are ‘primarily cashless.’

Which takes me on to point number three – I still use cash for some purchases as I don’t want to see it die.

How we pay for items should be a personal choice, and digital and non-digital options should be available. It annoys me when I see a sign saying ‘card-only.’ Again, a topic I have been vocal about in the past.

So I chuckled on Monday when I popped into Costa Coffee on Southend High Street to see a sign: ‘Apologies, our card machine is broken, please ask one of our team who can direct you to the nearest cash point.’

A little while back, in a separate Costa, I tried to pay with cash as I needed change for the car park (the parking app was down – and the car park only accepts coins).

When I ordered a coffee and tried to pay with cash, I was treated like an alien and was told it wasn’t possible. Why would any shop not want my physical money? Can they really be that choosy?

Often, friends laugh at me when I say I still believe in using cash, as if somehow it makes me stuck in the past.

I use my card for the majority of transactions, but I make sure every month, it’s not for ALL payments. And, as I have explained before, I like my 5 year-old daughter to see physical money, rather than it just been an invisible concept, an endless magical pot somewhere out of sight.

Back in 2018, I commissioned Natalie Ceeney – the former chief Financial Ombudsman and independent chair of the Access to Cash Review – to write a piece about how the downfall of coins and notes could unfold.

Much of it has proved eerily accurate and at the tail-end of last year, she wrote her follow-up for us: Could physical money soon be extinct? The answer to some of that falls into the arms of regulators.

So thankfully this week, the FCA revealed it had been handed fresh powers by the Government to ensure reasonable access to cash withdrawal and deposits.

Under the new rules, banks and building societies must weigh up whether local communities lack access to cash services, like branches and ATMs, and provide additional services where they find ‘significant gaps’.

It’s a step in the right direction – but it is still down to us to use it or lose it.

Mr Howells says the IT meltdown shows the ‘importance of cash as a fallback.’

He points to Link research which shows the most common reason people now carry cash is in case they can’t use cards. It shows that more people expect meltdowns like the one we saw on Friday.

He adds: ‘I’m expecting policymakers and regulators now to be much more demanding on how technology companies demonstrate resilience.

‘In the meantime, cash remains vital for millions of people, and critical if other systems go down. Despite people moving away from cash, £1.6billion a week is still being issued by our network.’

But some areas of London and the East of England could have no ATM machines within the next two years if the current trend of closures continues.

Do you really want to see that happen in the name of ‘convenience’?

If the answer is no, get yourself down to an ATM stat and start using cash, like you used to do…