Australia leads advance to cashless society, but warns risks could prove costly

Australia is experiencing its first-ever drop in the amount of cash in circulation as it results in the global advance towards becoming cashless, but this change has resulted in concerns that communications outages or cyber attacks could leave the economy dysfunctional. Before Covid-19, Australia was already an early and enthusiastic adopter of online banking, credit cards, and mobile phone payment systems. The pandemic accelerated the trend, as customers and retailers wanted contactless payments and the work-from-home trend resulted to a shift to buy-from-home and online deliveries.