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WHAT’S IN YOUR PHONE?

Armed with digital devices, young people are leading the way to a cashless future with 111% increase in consumer use of mobile person-to-person payment methods between 2014 and 2017, according to Boston-based research firm. Dylan Oesch-Emmel, a freshman at Tufts University, can count on one hand the times he has used cash recently: to convert currency for a trip to Montreal, and for cab fare when his smart phone died and he couldn’t use Uber.

“Quite frankly, I use zero cash,” said Oesch Emmel, 19, a Stoneham native. Like many in his age bracket, Oesch-Emmel does his banking online, rarely uses an ATM, and keeps a credit card for backup. Nearly all his purchases are made with payment apps on his iPhone 7 linked to his debit card: Venmo, which lets you make and share payments with friends, to split dinner and ride home with friends, for example, or goPuff to have the essentials of college life, such as shampoo, floss, and Cheetos, delivered to his dorm.

Yet while younger people such as Oesch-Emmel don’t have much use for cash, the United States actually lags other nations in moving toward a largely cashless financial system. Credit and debit cards have been in wide use here for much longer, and the nation’s large, complex banking system makes it difficult to adopt change quickly.

Shaun Ferrari, managing director of Currency Research, said electronic payment businesses are still at the stage here where they are competing against each other more so than cash. “It appears as though electronic forms of payment are cannibalizing each other rather than replacing cash,” Ferrari said. “Mobile has a long way to go to be a significant player in the payment landscape in the US.”

Boston-based research firm Aite Group in February reported a 111 percent increase in consumer use of mobile person-to-person payment methods between 2104 and 2017. A few of the big names are showing commanding gains: Zelle had a 59 percent rise in processing volume in 2018, to $119 billion. Venmo, for its part, processed $62 billion last year, up from $35 billion the year before One explanation for those increases, said Talie Baker of the Aite Group, is the ability of payment systems to be made in real time, instead of that lag people used to experience waiting for money to clear. This has made digital payments feel the same as getting cash, more or less instant and around the clock.