The War On Cash: Visa Offers Restaurant Merchants Incentive to Go Cashless

To Visa, a cashless culture means convenience, security and ease of use. That translates to freedom for consumers and merchants alike.

Beginning in August, Visa will roll out a new initiative called the Visa Cashless Challenge. According to the Wall Street Journal, this new initiative will work to push small merchants away from cash and towards card-and mobile-based payments. Merchants in the food and restaurant industries will be able to go through an application-based process, where 50 small businesses will be selected to receive roughly $10,000 to upgrade their payment processing to accept cashless forms of payments. In return, those selected merchants will limit or completely remove their cash payments.

If businesses in 100 cities transitioned from cash to digital, their cities stand to experience net benefits of $312 billion per year.  It is clear that Visa views cash as their biggest competition. They are already the leader of the U.S. card payments market, processing 59…