Cashless transactions, such as mobile and card payments, are quietly overtaking cash as the most common form of transaction around the world.
But the sense of cash versus cashless varies from region to region and between countries.
So where does Vietnam stand on this issue?
Here is an overview of the countries that talk most positively about cashless societies:
Merchant machine analyzed geotagged tweets to find out which countries want or reject a cashless society, showing that Vietnam is pro-cashless.
With so many neobanks, digital wallets and apps making it easier than ever to pay for things cashless, it’s clear that a cashless future is a reality for many. In fact, more and more people in the US and around the world are not paying with cash at all when they go shopping.
Some countries, such as Japan, are making major changes to ride the cashless wave, while in others, cash remains king. Assuming someone has access to both and can choose between them, there are many factors that can affect someone’s preferred method of payment.
For example, you would like cash to be readily available at ATMs, and to be able to physically account for it for better budgeting. But with banking apps and digital wallets, you can manage your income and expenses at the touch of a button and make transactions quickly and efficiently.
Both sides of the argument have strengths, and everyone has their own individual preference – but like it or not, non-cash transactions are on the rise globally, pointing to a move toward a cashless future. So, where do countries and US states stand on the issue today? Merchant Machine turned to Twitter to find out if people are more for or against a cashless society.
To gauge the sentiment of each country and US state towards cashless payments, Merchant Machine retrieved geotagged tweets using the following search terms: Cashless, Contactless, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Microsoft Wallet, PayPal, Alipay, Facebook Pay, Walmart Pay, Mozido , Dashlane, Veno, Zelle, Paycloud.
They’ve removed all duplicates, allowing a maximum of one tweet per account per day. The team only reviewed tweets in English, Spanish, German, French or Italian.
Merchant Machine then applied an AI algorithm using the Hugging Face API to classify tweets as positive, negative, or neutral. This allowed them to classify places as “wanting” or “rejecting” a cashless society based on whether the percentage of positive (wanting) or negative (rejecting) cashless tweets was higher.
Finally, they ranked all regions by both % positive and % negative tweets to create maps showing which states and countries have the strongest sentiment to want or reject a cashless society.
The country results were further filtered by adding a minimum threshold of 100 tweets, leaving 88 countries.
The data was collected in September 2022.
The dataset of the full study can be found here:
