Sweden is on track to becoming the world's first cashless society, thanks to the country's embrace of IT, as well as a crackdown on organized crime and terror, according to a study from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Niklas Arvidsson, a researcher in industrial economics and management at KTH, says that the widespread and growing embrace of the mobile payment system, Swish, is helping hasten the day when Sweden replaces cash altogether.
"Cash is still an important means of payment in many countries' markets, but that no longer applies here in Sweden," Arvidsson says. "Our use of cash is small, and it's decreasing rapidly."