Payments News

Visa Messaging Relentless

Visa carried out a Consumer Payment Attitudes study in Singapore in October 2022. It found that nearly 90% of Singaporean consumers regard cashless payments and mobile banking to be the most eco-friendly option.

Such a headline and report quietly reinforce perceptions and messages about payments without any balancing information or discussion about the alternatives. For example, that account-to-account payments have a lower impact than card or mobile wallet payments. Or that the gap between cash and digital payments hasn’t actually been measured on a basis that can be sensibly compared.

A recent report by Galaxy Digital found that the estimated annual energy consumption of the banking system was twice that of Bitcoin, with banks, data centres accounting for over 90% of their energy use. K33 Research has published work by Arcane Research that showed the climate footprint of Bitcoin was 37 Mt CO2, while the total Global Green House emissions of the digital tech industry are some 1,600 MT. Data centres used 191 Mt, watching YouTube and gaming 40 Mt, networks 199 Mt and end user devices 440 Mt.