 Hi, I'm John Collins. I'm an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center, and I work on digital finance issues I also founded a little nonprofit in the state of Delaware called the first state fintech lab and among other things we work on Access to Opportunity so today I want to talk about the cashless economy I think probably many of you are wondering is there actually a cash economy and in the words of the Wu Tang clan cashrolls everything around me dollar dollar bills y'all and there are a lot of dollar dollar bills probably surprising to you in fact the cash economy in the United States is 2.3 trillion dollars Per year to put that in a little bit of perspective the overall gross Domestic product of the country the size of the economy per year is About 19 trillion dollars, so smart people here 2.3 out of 19. It's pretty significant Even though many of us probably don't use a ton of cash So think about like what you have in your wallet right now. I'll pull mine out I have a business credit card. I have a personal credit card. I have a debit card I do have cash because I won a bet this weekend at a Kentucky Derby party That's the only reason I have it and then aside from my wallet. I obviously have Phone right a smartphone in fact a cracked one, but it still works and so on here. I've got Venmo I've got Apple pay. I've got my Starbucks app So even in situations where I might not have my wallet I have this and I can access a lot of commerce nowadays via that and I'm not alone in fact the Federal Reserve has taken a look at How many payment mechanisms the average American has and 50% of us have six plus ways that we can pay for things? So you've seen you've seen that increase over time, right? There's only more fintech applications more types of credit cards coming out This is a really bad graph But I just want you to take a look at that dark line that goes down That's the amount of cash being used as the two other lines at the top there Which are debit cards and credit cards are increasing right and that makes a lot of sense right you're increased use of this Merchants are seeing this as well. So sweet green which is a luxury coleslaw merchant. They Found that about 10% of their customers use cash only 10. So they said you know what? We're not gonna accept cash anymore We're gonna be a cashless store and there's some reasons for that good reasons in fact man's makes transactions quicker It makes places that have a lot of cash, you know less susceptible to theft And so they said look we're just gonna be a cashless store and a number of other stores have done this too And that's all great right like we're a bunch of internet nerds We've got smartphones We can go out and go to bluestone lane or go to sweet green or go wherever is cashless And we can access the the economy and that's all good. Well, it's not really good It's not good for everybody eight point four million people in this country are unbanked That's about six and a half percent of the population Where I spend a lot of time Washington DC About 25 percent of the African-American population is unbanked and about 36 percent are underbanked And so what happens is when you have populations that don't have access to financial services Then you create places where they must have access to financial services You exclude them and you create as these cities get more expensive more and more gentrified areas that that are exclusionary and the Civil Rights Act in the United States requires and in fact You know maintains that people have equal access to the enjoyment of public accommodations like retail goods so Cities and jurisdiction the governments are responding to this in different ways in fact, Massachusetts in 1978 Passed a law saying look you got to accept cash everywhere and you've seen more recently as these stores have Kind of put out these proposals other cities follow suit So the city of Philadelphia more recently the city of New York the city the state of New Jersey have passed legislation to say look You got to accept cash. We're banning these cashless stores And so where does that leave us unfortunately? I'm not going to be able to give you any solutions today But in this five-minute talk but on one side look We've got a system that that is making transactions easier and cheaper in some cases But it's excluding a large part of the population. So that's a problem Bands are our blunt policy instruments that certainly Solve the problem in part, but they they don't really get the underlying issue Which is we need to provide better access to financial services for people who don't have it Part of the solution might be innovation it might be sort of more fintech applications It might be regulation because a big part of the problem is that fees and Expenses related to financial services can be expensive, especially as a percentage of income But regardless what the policy focus needs to be on and should be on is making sure that more underserved Interrepresented populations more diverse groups of people have access to these services and to the wider economy. Thank you