Retail banking is quietly abandoning physical cash. Branch networks across Europe have shrunk by roughly a third in a decade, and the ATM estate is following: machines are expensive to own, service, insure and replenish, and every withdrawal is a cost line rather than a fee line for the bank that owns the box. The obvious conclusion, the one the market has already priced, is that cash is dying and anything attached to it is a melting ice cube.
The premise is half right and the conclusion is wrong. Cash transaction share does fall a few points a year, but the amount of currency in circulation keeps grinding to new highs, and the floor under physical availability is no longer commercial, it is legal. Several European states now oblige merchants or banks to accept and provide cash, national regulators have pushed banks into shared access commitments, and civil preparedness has turned the argument from nostalgia into infrastructure policy: the April 2025 Iberian blackout took card terminals down with the grid, and Nordic governments now explicitly tell households to hold banknotes for a crisis. A country can let cash use decline. It cannot let cash availability go to zero.