Can Sri Lanka Really Go Cashless? The Truth Behind the Digital Revolution

When the Corner Shop Stops Taking Cash

Tuesday night. The queue outside my neighborhood takeaway stretches past the shop front and onto the street. Everyone’s holding their phone, waiting to pay for kottu, burgers, fried rice, whatever they came for. The old man running the place peers through his reading glasses at each QR code, occasionally telling someone to hold still so he can scan properly. Two years ago, this guy only dealt in notes and coins. Now he’s gone fully digital.

You’ll see the same thing all over Sri Lanka. Big cities, small towns, doesn’t matter. We’re racing toward a world without physical money. What’s less clear is whether we’ve actually thought through what happens when we get there.

How Fast Things Changed

It wasn’t that long ago when getting correct change felt like negotiating a hostage situation. Bus conductors used to lug around sacks of rupees and coins, counting and recounting at every stop. That era is basically over. Digital payments took off after COVID and never looked back. Now you can pay for almost anything with a screen tap. Tuk-tuk fare? Scan. Temple donation? Scan. Midnight snack? Same thing.

Nobody can deny how much easier this makes life. No scrambling for exact change at checkout. No stuffed wallet when you take the kids shopping. Entrepreneurs run entire online businesses using nothing but mobile payment apps. They’ve never held a customer’s cash, and their operations work fine.

Who This Leaves Out

But here’s what bothers me. Talk to most older people and they still want physical money. These aren’t technophobes. They’re people who can figure out how to video call relatives halfway across the world. Yet they trust banknotes more than banking apps. Ask why and you’ll hear the same things: “What if the system goes down?” or “What if someone hacks my account?”

Dismissing these worries as old-fashioned thinking misses the point entirely. These are valid concerns that stop huge numbers of people from trusting digital transactions.

Geography makes it worse. Someone living in Colombo barely carries cash anymore. Someone in a rural village? Still paying for everything the traditional way. Think about the vendor at your local vegetable market. Going digital creates actual barriers for them. Half their customers might not own smartphones. The vendor themselves might have no clue how to process a digital payment even if they wanted to.

The Fraud Problem Is Real

Security threats aren’t imaginary. We’ve all heard the stories. Phishing schemes. Money vanishing from accounts overnight. Fake bank officials calling to trick people into sharing one-time passwords. Some victims realize what’s happening before it’s too late. Plenty don’t. The more we depend on cashless systems, the bigger the target we become for increasingly sophisticated scams.

Privacy takes a hit too. Every tap of your phone creates a permanent record. Advocates say this transparency helps track crime and boost tax compliance. That’s true. But it also means corporations and government agencies know your exact spending habits. What you buy, where you buy it, when you make the purchase. Cash transactions keep that information private. Digital ones turn your financial life into data that gets stored, analyzed, and used in ways you never signed off on.

What Actually Gets Better

Still, pretending there aren’t upsides would be dishonest. Digital payments make theft harder and create obstacles for corrupt officials trying to move dirty money. They push informal economic activity into the formal system, which could mean more tax revenue for public services. Businesses save time they’d otherwise waste counting bills and making bank runs.

Economic crises expose another benefit. When ATMs run empty and physical currency becomes scarce, digital systems keep things moving. People who swore they’d never go cashless suddenly have no alternative. Most discover it’s not nearly as terrifying as they assumed.

Making It Work for Everyone

The cashless future is coming whether we feel prepared or not. What we desperately need is better education about these tools, especially for older generations and people outside major cities. Internet infrastructure has to improve across the entire country, not just urban centers. Mobile banking apps need to work smoothly enough that people who live hours from the nearest bank branch can actually use them.

Schools should start teaching basic cybersecurity. Consumer protection laws need real teeth to go after digital fraud.

Both, Not Either

Here’s the answer nobody wants to hear: we shouldn’t have to choose. Build a system where cash and digital coexist without friction. Where a market vendor can accept a QR code payment or a hundred-rupee note and neither creates problems. Where technological progress doesn’t automatically exclude anyone.

So are we ready? Some people absolutely are. A whole lot more aren’t even close. The challenge isn’t just getting there. It’s making sure the journey doesn’t strand half the population along the way. An economy that works for the digitally connected while abandoning everyone else isn’t an achievement. It’s just replacing old inequalities with new ones.

This transformation is happening right now. What matters is who we bring along for the ride.