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Visa makes an offer for restaurants to go cashless
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Jul 12, 2017
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Visa makes an offer for restaurants to go cashless
Visa is announcing a new offer to a group of 50 restaurants and food vendors: Take $10,000 from the credit card giant to upgrade their payments systems, and in exchange, stop accepting cash altogether.
Visa credit cards are arranged on a desk February 25, 2008 in San Francisco, California. Visa Inc. is hoping that its initial public offering could raise up to $19 billion and becoming  the largest IPO in U.S. history.
Visa credit cards are arranged on a desk February 25, 2008 in San Francisco, California. Visa Inc. is hoping that its initial public offering could raise up to $19 billion and becoming the largest IPO in U.S. history.
(
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Visa is announcing a new offer to a group of 50 restaurants and food vendors: Take $10,000 from the credit card giant to upgrade their payments systems, and in exchange, stop accepting cash altogether.

Visa is announcing a new offer to a group of 50 restaurants and food vendors: Take $10,000 from the credit card giant to upgrade their payments systems, and in exchange, stop accepting cash altogether.

It’s a step toward Visa’s long-running battle against cash, its largest competitor. Investing in card readers and technologies like Apple Pay, along with credit card interchange fees, are major impediments to smaller businesses switching away from cash. But cash is still a formidable force in the economy at large: Roughly a third of all U.S. consumer transactions were made in cash in 2015, compared to 27 percent from debit cards and 21 percent for credit cards, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Small business owners, what do you think of Visa’s push toward a cashless system? Is $10,000 enough of an incentive to move off cash completely? Consumers, how often do you still use cash in your day-to-day transactions, and how much would a cash-free system affect you?

Guest:

Maria Aspan, senior editor at Inc. magazine who run the Money section; she tweets

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