(sda) Payment by invoice is most widely accepted by Swiss companies with a share of 83 percent in the survey. Transfers (68 percent) and cash (60 percent) follow at some distance, as the SNB notes in the study published on Thursday. And only every fourth company accepts credit and debit cards as well as payment apps.
For irregular payments, 80 percent of companies prefer bank transfers and 61 percent prefer invoices. Credit cards and cash are significantly less important with a share of 40 and 35 percent respectively. The use of payment methods by companies has also hardly changed since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, it is said.
According to the study, only every tenth company restricted the acceptance of cash during the corona crisis. In return, 16 percent of the companies surveyed would have expanded the acceptance of cashless payment methods. According to the SNB, the reasons for this are concerns about hygiene when exchanging cash and the associated changing customer needs.
Three quarters of the companies that accepted cash before the crisis did not change their use of cash even during the crisis. In addition, 70 percent of these companies do not expect any changes in cash usage in the future. If companies reduced the use of cash, it was mainly for reasons of hygiene.
One in three of the companies surveyed expects the local cash infrastructure to decrease over the next few years. This includes, for example, reducing the number of ATMs available or the closure of bank and post office branches, through which the majority of their cash flows are processed. Around half of the companies surveyed therefore expect that the supply of cash will become more difficult.
More than 2000 companies of all sizes, sectors and language regions took part in the survey. The survey took place from mid-May to the end of July 2021.
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