Why Cashless? Why Now?

Why is it happening around the world? For starters: because technology allows it. Smartphones are evolving to be the only thing we really need to manage our finances. We’ll get into the whys, whats and hows of “cashlessness” in this article. As always, our true north is “should we invest in this inevitability? If so, how?”

Why am I looking at this inevitability now? We had just finished a deep-dive on the Indian Banking system and a full-fledged valuation of a top Indian Bank. That got me thinking about a cashless society and how it would affect Banking. India is a good example of progress towards cashlessness. Indians don’t mind banking (literally) on their smartphone. They don’t mind using digital wallets. After all, it’s a young, tech-savvy country. You’ll see some stats later. And once I got thinking about that, I had a flashback about my work in October this year on the current monetary system in general, and Cryptocurrencies. Do we even need Cryptos if we get rid of cash?

This Worldview article sits right at the heart of 3 of The Buylyst’s favorite thematic vectors: India, Finance & Fintech, and Retail. We love this. We think investments have a much greater chance of a high payoff when they are multi-themed. Hey, if we can find an investment that treads all our 10 themes, lollapalooza!

We’ll do this in 2 parts. This is Part 1.