The use of cash for transactions have slowed down over the years since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020 with people turning to card payments and digital transactions instead.
According to the Global Payment Report 2024, the use of cash for payments accounted for 16% ($6 trillion) of global transaction value in 2023.
The report further highlights the preference for cash payments in most countries including Nigeria as over 90% of transaction value was still in cash payments as at 2019.
Although cash is still the leading payment method in Nigeria, the volume of cash transactions have dropped to 55% today.
Top 10 countries where cash transactions are a major form of payment
Below is a full list of countries included in the report, along with cash’s share of transaction value in those countries;
| Country | Volume of Cash payment | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nigeria | 55% |
| 2 | Thailand | 46% |
| 3 | Philippines | 44% |
| 4 | Japan | 41% |
| 5 | Mexico | 38% |
| 6 | Spain | 38% |
| 7 | Indonesia | 38% |
| 8 | Vietnam | 38% |
| 9 | Germany | 36% |
| 10 | Peru | 35% |
Other countries like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and most Nordic countries have fully adopted non-cash transactions while the report predicts that France, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and the U.S will fall below the 10% transaction value threshold for cash by 2027.
Nigeria has made significant improvements in terms of cash usage as evident in the rise of cashless transactions to ₦237 trillion in the first quarter of 2024, an 88% increase from the ₦126 trillion reported in Q1, 2023.
The Nigeria Interbank Settlement System, NIBSS further highlighted the different avenues used mostly for the transactions which include internet banking, mobile apps, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), POS, ATM, etc.
According to the data, electronic payment channels were used 11.05 billion times in 2023 while value of Point of Sales (POS) transactions was ₦10.7 trillion and relied upon for 1.38 billion times.