TL;DR I dislike mobilepay because, in my opinion, it fundamentally changes people's behaviour around owing even the tiniest amount of money.
In Denmark, the biggest (private) bank put out a product called MobilePay. It allows the transferral of money from one person to another by just knowing their phone number (eight digits). Companies can pay to have special five-digit recipient numbers. The transfer is handled by Danske Bank's systems, but neither the sender nor the receiver have to be a customer in this bank. It's also free (as in beer).
In Denmark, everybody uses mobilepay (except me). I want to talk about why I don't use mobilepay and why I remain sceptic of it.
In my previous job, we had a horrible coffee machine. I didn't realise just how horrible it was until I had had an entire year without coffee (2015 was... interesting). After New Year's 2015-2016, I had an excellent mocca and was excited to return to good coffee. But I didn't. The Great Decaffeination of 2015 must have caused a change in my taste buds and subtly adjusted my tolerance for bitterness or other flavours extracted in coffee, because the workplace coffee had gone from being "decent" to "downright undrinkable".
To remedy the situation, I scoured the neighbourhood for good cafees. A workplace in the city centre has its perks, one of them being that good coffee places are almost everywhere, and so I located a nearby cafe that served excellent coffee (double-roasted espresso makes for amazing americanos).
At some point, I asked a colleague if she would want coffee also, as I was headed out anyway. She said yes.
When I got back her first question was: "What's your mobile number?"
I was puzzled.
Eventually I figured out that she wanted to pay me back immediately for the coffee. I explained that I don't have mobilepay and that I'm happy to forego the collection of the grand sum of 20DKK. She had a hard time accepting that and made it clear that she felt like she owed me a cup of coffee, so the next one would be on her. Fine by me.
I had multiple instances of people being baffled that they couldn't immediately transfer me money, as if the very idea that they would owe me any amount of money is bad. (Another story is the time a colleague asked me to get him a sandwich for lunch and it bothered him tremendously that he couldn't give me money immediately.) From time to time, I have struggled to make people just accept that I paid and that there's no bill or debt for them to settle. If they want they can view it as a gift.
The converse has also been true, where I've been asked to pay by mobilepay and have had people be upset that I couldn't accomodate them.
In discussions with friends and family, I have understood that the use of mobilepay has affected how people settle tabs. If a group of people go to a restaurant or bar and someone pays for a meal or a round of drinks, it's now expected that everybody pays up immediately. The term "buying a round" loses all meaning, because no-one is ever really buying anything for anyone else.
I detest that mobilepay has made it difficult to do something so simple as buying someone else a drink. It's honestly spoiling the joy of giving little spontaneous gifts, because people are being trained to view it as a transaction that have monetary value and incurs a debt.
In the book "Debt" the author offers the following idea of debt that I'll attempt to paraphrase here: If Bob owes Alice money, then that debt forms a relationship between them (at least form part of their relationship). There are examples of tribes where this is almost literally the case. If Bob then decides to settle the debt, then he is effectively ending that relationship. If nothing else, he's altering the balance of the relationship, in effect saying "I don't want to be beholden to you".
To put it a different way, the modern economy wants us to imagine ourselves as self-interested insular entities (almost like countries or corporations) that trade (or barter) with each other and only maintain relationships for business reasons. I think this is where the concept of something like mobilepay is conceived and makes sense. But that's just bullshit. Such a world view is idiotic, truly sad, and completely diminishes the non-monetary value of personal relationships.
In the small way that I can resist, I refuse to use mobilepay. I'll happily be owed some money (or gift it), or owe something for some unspecified time. I have also started gifting things when I can - particularly spontaneous gifts are fun.
My advice:
Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber)
Sacred Economics (Charles Eisenstein)
I haven't even touched upon technical concerns around having one private (private!) bank handle almost all small-to-medium money transfers. I will leave that discussion for another post.
"Why I dislike mobilepay" was published on 2021-05-06