2019 Cash Alternative Survey Results

Kim Huynh, Gradon Nicholls and Mitchell Nicholson ()

No 2020-8, Discussion Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: The role of cash in Canadians’ lives has evolved over the past decade. During this period, two diverging trends have emerged in Canada: the use of cash for transactions at the point of sale has declined, but overall demand for cash has increased. The 2019 Cash Alternative Survey was designed to study these trends and update the Bank of Canada’s understanding of Canadians’ use of cash. We asked Canadians about their cash holdings, planned future use of cash and views on how they would be affected if cash were to disappear. In addition to declining cash use, the emergence of privately issued digital currencies has motivated many central banks to conduct research into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). We contribute to the Bank of Canada’s research on CBDC by monitoring Canadians’ use of cash and their adoption of digital payment methods. We find that Canadians’ cash holdings are stable and the adoption of cryptocurrencies remains limited and concentrated in a few sub-demographics. Moreover, we find that few Canadians plan to stop using cash entirely and that a considerable share of them would find the disappearance of cash problematic.

Keywords: Bank notes; Central bank research; Digital currencies and fintech; Econometric and statistical methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C12 C9 E4 O5 O51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-pay
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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