Which country is closest to being cashless?

Sweden, where cash accounts for a very small share of transactions and a great many shops, cafes and even churches simply refuse it. The shift was driven partly by a domestic payment app, Swish, used by most of the adult population, and partly by banks that stopped handling notes at branches.

It has become a policy problem rather than a success story. The Riksbank and the government have grown alarmed at how fast it happened, because a fully digital system excludes people - the elderly, the poor, recent arrivals without bank accounts - and because it is fragile. A country with no cash has no fallback when the power or the network fails, which for a state with Sweden's neighbours is a defence question as much as a consumer one. Legislation now requires banks to keep providing cash services, and the civil contingencies agency has advised households to keep notes at home.

That reversal is the interesting part. Sweden got further towards cashless than anywhere else and is now deliberately slowing down, having discovered that the last few per cent of cash use is not inefficiency but resilience and inclusion. Several other countries watching the experiment have taken the lesson before making the same move.