There’s a conspicuous lack of cash on Sweden’s streets.
So ubiquitous are digital payments in the country that attempting a paper money transaction at a Swedish bank might provoke a suspicious stare or a report to the police. That’s according to Niklas Arvidsson, a professor at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
The country has actually been inching toward a cashless system for many years now. From bus fares to street magazines, digital payments are accepted almost everywhere; the Swedish Federation of Trade also also claims it is “leading the world in cashless trading.”