Your bank branch will close

[#1]

Here is an interesting take on what is going to happen to "payments". The old style physical structure of banks and branches will gradually fade away as internet system take over. Meanwhile the banks themselves are keen to get their hands on cash transactions by forcing retailers to (pay for) Touch ready card readers and upping the limit from £20 to £30 per transaction. This will mean less Post Office Branches and more capability for the Government to undertake surveillance on your life. A move away from cash  would make the Black Economy more difficult.
Prepare for mandatory National Id Cards and the removal of cash transactions as the EU attempts to tackle illegal immigrants.

[#2]

the id cards is actually a decent idea, although it would be far better if it was an id chip (cant get lost ) then again why bother with an id chip when everywhere you go can fit retinal voice thumbprint face and xray scanners so they can all have copies of the same data about you .....
cashless society will likely never happen for a couple of reasons but primarily if there is no cash then the trading token (money) has no value and if the worlds electricity were to crash (likely given what we know about the current state of power generation systems and its age) then you need something to fall back on other wise you have only barter chaos and lack /loss of standardisation ....

[#3]

It's like some sceince fiction novel where the rich half of the world lives its life in a hermetically sealed environment and don't interact with the poor half outside. Have these people ever been to rural Africa? Proper folding money is still alive there and there is no way out. They don't produce anything to "trade" with us and definitly not electronically. We can't ditch coin until we have a means of including the majority of the world populace who still rely on it 

[#4]

It's already happening!
In my area HSBC and Barclays have closed their branches just leaving NatWest.
We wondered why the banks each need a branch as they seem to exist only for accepting cash/cheque deposits and cheque cashing. They were only small local branches with no 'lending' powers so a counter would do in a combined facility!

[#5]

It all went wrong with the demise of the wage packet.
Banks used to beg for your money.
Now you have to beg banks for your own money.

[#6]

and since cheques cease to be legal in short time there likely wont be any need for anything other than a deposit /withdrawal machine inside a lobby getting rid of 90% of jobs within banks, but that's not exactly "new" banks have been closing sub branches for decades, when I was growing up the local villages all had multiple sub branches and they were all closed by the time I left school leaving customers with only the option of a trip to the main branch 10 miles away if they needed something, a problem that lead to the local council having to issue free travel tokens (for payment in arrears) since so many people had no way of getting money without the branch(s) as the majority were still using passbook accounts and hadn't been upgraded to cash cards ......

the great thing about electronic cash is the ability to access and spend it without ever seeing the hard currency (which is why they don't print as much of it as they used to) the problems with it are card handling fees are over the top and unless they disappear nobody will go totally cashless in any society and any move to force that will likely be met with very stiff resistance and probably a lot of hacktavist action to boot, hard currency is too ingrained in our lives to be done away with and despite the press campaigns the companies developing such mechanics would have us believe it wont happen in this centaury and likely not in the next either, digits on a screen are too simple to manipulate and thus purely digital banking will never be possible  

[#7]

Don't forget to have a Faraday Cage for your Touch bank cards. However the card issuers have re-assured us that our cards will not be debited accidentally or maliciously so they must be safe.
Personally I keep mine in a metallic case in my pocket, but I am thinking of installing a touch card reader in the style gate to the public footpath across my orchard. It is a bit of a tight squeeze as people slip through. All proceeds to a suitable charity.

[#8]

Keep your cards in a RFID wallet and you will be safe. They are available on ebay from under £2 each.

[#9]

Makes me wonder, if we went cashless, how would we pay for things at a market stall or a car boot sale? They're not always (if ever) set up to take card payments, and I doubt they ever will be...

[#10]

I have beside me on the desk a cheque from HMRC, a refund for overpaid tax.
Why didn't they just pay it into my bank account and save the paperwork and me the hassle of going to the bank to pay it in.
Progress.

[#11]

In the US cheques are rare but if you get one you can take a pic of it using an app on your smartphone and that pays it into your account. One bank in the UK is testing this out.

[#12]

Quote from: twocvbloke

Makes me wonder, if we went cashless, how would we pay for things at a market stall or a car boot sale? ...

I have sitting on the desk in front of me a PayPal Here card reader. It does CHIPn PIN, swipe and Touch. It hooks into my Android via bluetooth. for a fee of 0.75% for touch I can take payment anywhere, in the world, where I can get a mobile phone signal.
I bought it (circa £60) for the purpose of selling goods at a car boot sale and also for top up payments for guests in my holiday home. It creates a great audit trail I can use should HMRC come knocking at my door wanting to check my accounts.

[#13]

indeed the mobile payment systems can be fantastic and really do open up ones ability to accept readily auditable payments in a variety of situations the processing fees being charged by the various providers are prohibitive in a competitive market place, 0.75% doesn't sound like a lot but it quickly mounts up to a large chunk of the profit margin in many smaller enterprises....
although the digital cheque processing idea and indeed the digital e-cheque idea are just modernisations of the current payment system they would fall under the purview of this announcement http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8414341.stm such that many banks no longer issue cheque books and some no longer allow personal cheques to be paid into non business accounts
the great thing about cheques is that you could use one to pay for something a day or two in advance of when the money to clear it with would actually arrive in your account, since the clearing process was sped up from 4 days to 12 hours that is no longer possible and they are in effect redundant and pointless given other payment options which are actually instant and allow you to retain better track over personal finances (like card payments or bank transfers)
all that's needed now is for the fees for payment systems like paypal to become lower (like 0.01% of each transaction) with no minimum fee or transaction level, that would speed up adoption rates (who wants to trade at a car boot sale and be left with a bucket of cash to get robbed?) and still provide both sides with a decent profit margin, the payment providers would have higher sales volumes from which to make money and the vendors would not be hurting as less of their profit margin would be eaten up in transaction fees.
as for the bank branches, they wont disappear entirely as computers are pants at arranging loans /mortgages and cannot detect deception indicators like a person can so will likely remain as nobody will want to loose out on those lucrative finance incomes .....

[#14]

Quote from: twocvbloke

Makes me wonder, if we went cashless, how would we pay for things at a market stall or a car boot sale? They're not always (if ever) set up to take card payments, and I doubt they ever will be...

PayPal, mobile payments or cryptocurrency...

[#15]

Mobile payment systems will be welcomed by HMRC. Think of the additional tax they will be able to gather  HMRC has started looking at ebay and other such sites with a view to see who is avoiding tax and VAT payment.