COVID-19 Hasn’t Killed Merchant Acceptance of Cash: Results from the 2023 Merchant Acceptance Survey

Angelika Welte, Katrina Talavera, Liang Wang and Joy Wu

No 2024-02, Discussion Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: In recent years, the rise in digital payments has spurred a discussion in Canada and other countries about the future of cash at the point of sale. To better understand trends in payment methods accepted by Canadian businesses, including cash acceptance and the impact of innovations such as mobile payments, the Bank of Canada conducts the Merchant Acceptance Survey, a survey of small and medium-sized businesses. We find that 96% of these businesses in Canada accepted cash in 2023. Acceptance of debit and credit cards has increased since 2021 to 89%, and acceptance of digital payments has increased as well. However, the vast majority of merchants (92%) have no plans to go cashless in the future. Therefore, cash and digital payments continue to coexist at the point of sale, and Canada is far from being a cashless society.

Keywords: Bank notes; Digital currencies and fintech; Econometric and statistical methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 D22 E4 L2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2024-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2024/03/staff-discussion-paper-2024-2/ Abstract (text/html)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/sdp2024-2.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocadp:24-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().