Paidy CEO: Trust Is The Key To Advancing Japan’s Connected Economy
May 31, 2021
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Paidy
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Editorial
Russell Cummer, CEO and Founder of Paidy, speaks to Karen Webster about the importance of trust in shifting to cashless payments in the developed world in markets such as Japan. There is a tendency to associate cash-based consumers with developing economies and the world’s unbanked population. The cash-based customer, conventional wisdom goes, isn’t using cash from desire but from necessity, and offered something better by the transformative power of technology to digitize their funds, they will willingly jump at it. While this pattern may hold true in much of the world, it doesn’t work all that well in describing Japan, where the vast majority of consumers have bank accounts in one of the world’s more developed and regulated banking systems and still show an overwhelming cultural preference for using cash to pay. That preference, has meant eCommerce has developed comparably slowly in Japan compared to the rest of the world because there is so much friction, or what the Japanese call mendokusai, associated with eCommerce transactions. Consumers are either stuck waiting at home for a few hours so they can pay the delivery guy for their purchase, or they have to run out to a physical store to supply the cash and pay such that they can log back in, prove it, and actually finish their online transactions.
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