The Cashless Middlemen Are Collecting More Than Ever

What the Book Claimed

Brett Scott is a writer who once worked as a broker in London's financial district. In 2022 he published a book called Cloudmoney. One claim sits under everything else in it. Ordinary people never asked to give up paper money. The push to end cash comes from the companies positioned between every buyer and seller. Banks, card networks, and payment apps all collect a fee when a purchase routes through their computers. When a customer pays with paper, those companies collect nothing. The story that customers begged for a cashless world came out of their marketing departments.

A claim like that comes with a built-in test. Wait a few years and check on those companies in the middle. Did their take hold steady, or did it grow?

The Fees Went Up

Card networks charge stores a fee, called a swipe fee, on every card sale. When Scott was writing, American swipe fees ran about $161 billion a year. In 2023 they set a record at $187 billion. The 2024 total came in at $236 billion once the fuller accounting landed. That is half again what stores paid the year the book shipped. Moving digits between computers got no harder in those four years. The fee climbed because no shop owner in America has a number to call to negotiate it down. Congress noticed too. The business press spent this spring asking why two card networks set the price of buying groceries for a whole country.

The fee does not stay at the register. Stores fold it into the shelf price, so everybody pays it, card or not. The Merchants Payments Coalition, a group that speaks for stores, figures the load at more than a thousand dollars a year per family. The man paying cash gets charged for a card network he never used. His money helps fund the reward points on somebody else's card.

The Banks Are Minting Their Own Tokens

Scott's word for the money in a banking app was cloudmoney. It means numbers in a corporate data center that stand in for dollars the bank does not fully hold. Last summer Congress passed a law called the GENIUS Act. It created the first federal license for stablecoins, digital tokens built to hold a steady dollar value. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the agency that insures bank deposits, is writing the rules this year. The banks are lining up to issue their own tokens. Forbes, the business magazine, counts a $323 billion stablecoin market the banks now want for themselves.

Understand what a bank stablecoin is before the ads teach you wrong. It is the same private bank money Scott described, now programmable. A programmable token can carry rules about where it moves and who may hold it. The company that issues the token writes those rules, and its software enforces them. You will never be in the room where they get set. A paper dollar carries no rules at all.

A Law Had to Protect Cash

Here is the detail that settles the demand question. New York put a law into effect this year forcing stores to accept cash. Newsweek, a news magazine, reports a bill moving in Washington that would do the same nationwide. About six million Americans still run their lives on paper money. Sit with what that means.

Nobody writes a law to protect something the market is keeping alive on its own.

If customers had truly chosen cashless, cash would not need a law to stay spendable at a register. The want was built. The cash option is getting squeezed hard enough that lawmakers are stepping in front of it. No market research will ever answer the demand question straighter than that law does.

Where It Stands in 2026

Scott's book reads better this year than it did new. That is a compliment to him and bad news for the rest of us. The companies in the middle take more than they did when he described them. The pushback has moved into the statehouses. Read the book, then watch the fee reports and the token licenses for yourself. So far the numbers have only moved one way.

Next: the full review of Cloudmoney, for the whole argument and the receipts.