Cash Out Day Australia: Key voice for physical currency concedes event may have fizzled amid ‘unprecedented transformation'
One of Australia's most high-profile cash advocates has conceded a nationwide protest aimed at keeping physical currency alive may not have lived up to expectations and believes major global news could be partly to blame.
Cash Welcome founder Jason Bryce spruiked 'Cash Out Day' on April 22 as a chance to show banks and politicians that Australians 'expect to be able to access and use cash', and hoped ATMs would run hot as people dropped some money back into their wallets and purses.
Reserve Bank figures show about one million Australians withdraw notes every day, but Bryce was predicting that could double in what would be 'a resounding vote 'no' to the prospect of a cashless future'.
Two days on from Cash Out Day 2025, Bryce conceded it was unlikely to have reached that number or the heights of 2024, when there was a strong reaction on social media.
He told 7NEWS.com.au the death of Pope Francis may have been a factor, given he was bumped from several planned media interviews he had lined up to promote the event.
Bryce is waiting for updated Reserve Bank figures to see if there was any significant uptick in the number of withdrawals and is hopeful it was enough to reinforce to the government that cash remains important.
There was 29.62 million cash withdrawals in Australia in April, 2024, when last year's event was held.
The Australian Banking Association (ABA) said there 'no material difference in withdrawals of cash' at the time.
Bryce also said that the government's proposed cash mandate for essential services and items may have taken away a sense of urgency among those in cash's corner.
The mandate will likely apply to supermarkets, department stores, utilities, petrol stations, mechanics, pharmacies, GPs, and pet stores.
Bryce said this was 'very welcome', but wants it to be more broadly applied, with fewer exemptions.
Given the increasing costs to keep cash viable, Bryce is also keen to see authorities deliver a sustainable cash distribution system.
'Many Australians want or need to use cash and the RBA will ensure that cash remains a means of payment as long as that is the case,' a Reserve Bank (RBA) spokesperson told 7NEWS.com.au.
Seven per cent of Australians - more than 1.5 million people - use cash for 80 per cent of in-person transactions, but the use of notes and coins is on the way down.
About 70 per cent of consumer payments were made with cash in 2017, but that plummeted to just 13 per cent in 2022, according to the RBA.
It is expected to drop to just four per cent within five years.
Physical money has been harder to access too, with hundreds of bank branches and thousands of ATMs closed in recent years.
'Biggest transformation in the history'
ABA chief executive Anna Bligh said the way Australians bank 'is undergoing probably the biggest transformation in the history of the country, and that is changing pretty much everything'.
'It's changing how we pay for things, how we pay bills, how we transfer money to our family, and what we need or don't need in a branch anymore,' she said this week.
'So probably the biggest activity that most Australians use branches for throughout the history of banking, has been going and depositing or withdrawing cash.
'We are, as Australian, using less and less and less cash.'
She said a move away from physical currency to digitised banking has 'massive implications for what our branches are doing'.
'If people aren't coming in anymore to withdraw or deposit cash, then that really changes what a branch is and what it might look like in the future,' she said.
The big four have agreed not to close any more regional locations until at least 2027.
'Part of the reason for that is to sit down with the government, with Australia Post, and to think (about what it is) that people still need face-to-face services for, because increasingly, it's not cash,' Bligh said.
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