Japan Trying To Go Cashless For The Olympics

Later this year the 33rd Olympiad will be held in Tokyo. This worldwide celebration of athletics can bring the world together like few other events can as many nations send their best to compete. National pride is on the line and national heroes will be made. The events bring in millions of spectators, who will of course need to eat, sleep and play tourist and that means that they will be spending money. For those that are fortunate to be able to go to Japan to take in the Olympics you had better bring a credit card as Visa and the Japanese government are working to make the nation and the Olympiad cashless.

Cashless Japan And The Olympics

The 2020 Olympics will kick off on July 24 and run through August 9. Visa, one of the core sponsors of the Olympic games is working with the Japanese government on an initiative called Cashless Japan. It is intended to increase mobile payments with both consumers and merchants to 40% of all payments made by 2025. Currently about 20% of all payments are made using a cashless form of payment, which lags behind even that of the US.

Visa is rolling out several new services to try to help make this a reality. They are working to improve the number of convenience stores and quick service restaurants that accept digital payments. New technology will be introduced and Visa has been working to get Japanese Olympic hopefuls to promote it. They will also step up their analytics information that is available to merchants, so they can hopefully show that these forms of payment are becoming more popular and can thus be extremely lucrative.

A Big Event To Increase Acceptance

With more merchants accepting these forms of payment it is hoped that more Japanese citizens will give it a try and will find these alternate forms of payment to be good and useful for them. It is hoped that the Olympics will serve as a springboard to introduce this and make these forms of payment far more acceptable. 

Japan is considered to be one of the more technologically advanced countries in the world but despite that cash is still king in the country. It is one of the largest economies in the world, but unlike its similarly technologically advanced neighbor South Korea, digital payments are not common. Part of it has to do with high surcharge rates and high interchange fees in the country. Part of it also has to do with a large percentage of the population being older and thus less open to using new technology to make payments.

The Japanese government does have incentive to do this. It is estimated that it costs them ¥2 trillion (around $1.8 billion) annually to maintain ATMs and to make sure that cash is transported securely. That is a large sum of money that could be put to use elsewhere.

Cashless Japan has been started with sporting events to increase acceptance. Rakuten has made its baseball and football stadiums cashless and the program got a trial run at the Rugby World Cup, one of the most popular sporting events in the world, which was held in the country last year. Large businesses are getting on board with the program but smaller businesses have been harder to convince. 

There will be a day when cash does not exist. When that happens is up for debate but it will happen. One day every payment will be made using a smartphone (or whatever the future equivalent of that is) as even the credit card’s days are numbered. This is the future and it will begin here in the United States soon.