I saw a survey of UK consumers which I am sure is even more relevant to Australia, which showed on average, they now carry less than £5 in cash which is much less than a few years ago. What shocked me was that 14% of consumers now carry no cash. Soon this picture is what will happen that a person will want to pay by waving his watch over your EFTPOS machine. I hope your machine can do it. Since it is coming I decided to do an analysis of electronic transactions and its fees with regard to our clients.
Even currently looking at the figures, I was blown away that some of our clients in what I know are fairly small shops are now doing over $5500 a month in EFTpos value. Clearly what is driving it is the high usage rate of Australians with electronic money.
Looking at the list what I noticed was about 80% of my clients now have an integrated solution, where the point of sale talks directly to the EFTPOS machine. These can now do electronic transactions with faster speeds than cash. Another big advantage is accuracy, there are more errors in manual processing whether it is cash or electronic money.
There was clearly much higher usage rate of EFTPOS by those that had an integrated system. An integrated system did an average of $68,000/month while a non-integrated system did an average of $8,400. That is a big difference. People obviously with integrated solutions are preferring to use the integrated solution.
Interesting the fees were about the same .33%. It is the services they use EFTPOS, credit or cash out plus the mix between the number of transactions and the average value of transactions that were a more important factor in the fees, not the integration.
Considering that it is about .33%, I am wondering if it's even worth handling cash for many retailers today because the cost of cash handling is much greater than this. Although it is only a few shops now that only accept electronic money, I am sure that many more shops soon will soon accept only electronic money.
