Cash is still king in Belgium

Last year, an average Belgian consumer paid digitally 150 times, using his card of smartphone. That is not even half of what an average Swede does. The main culprits are an overabundance of cash machines and a limited number of payment terminals at smaller entrepreneurs.

Too many cash terminals

Sweden pays electronically most often: 317 times per year. The Germans are at the other end of the scale, with only 49 digital transactions. In between are the Brits (249), the Dutch (229), the French (165) and the Belgians (150), according to Bank for International Settlements results according to business paper De Tijd.

One of the reasons why cash still rules supreme in Belgium is that we have five times as many cash terminals per inhabitant than the Dutch. Our northern neighbours also have twice as many payment terminals compared to Belgium. “We trail because too few small entrepreneurs, like bakers, hairdressers and sandwich bars, offer digital payment services”, Leo Van Hove, professor of economy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel said. “Many of them only accept cash, because digital payment services are too expensive.”

Plenty of advantages

According to the VUB’s financial expert, digital payments offers many advantages. “Cash needs to be transported, counted, stockpiled and secured, which costs banks and stores millions”, Van Hove told De Tijd. “Digital payments are safer and make it harder for an economy ‘off the books’.”

“A digital payment in the Netherlands does not cost as much as a cash payment, because they do it so often that its costs are offset. We have not reached that point in Belgium at all.”