By Briana Marbury, CEO at Interledger Foundation
Somewhere in the US right now, someone was just charged for a subscription they forgot to cancel. The payment was automatic, set up easily when they subscribed, and set to renew each month indefinitely.
The thing is, the majority of Americans say they prefer it this way.
A new Interledger Foundation survey, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: What US Payment Preferences Reveal About the Future of Finance,” finds that 35% of Americans are willing to abandon cards, and 51% are willing to give up cash entirely.
Cash and cards are active payment methods that require the consumer to take action, like producing a card and entering a PIN. Automatic payments, on the other hand, require no action from the buyer at all. Their money moves automatically in the background, often without an alert or notification. American consumers may be genuinely happy with this hands-off approach, but it comes with a dark side.
When payments happen in the background and consumers aren’t watching, companies can raise prices, add fees and tack on services without meaningful friction or even without the buyer explicitly agreeing. And those who can’t access that automatic payment system at all are being left behind as businesses rush toward a cashless default. Fixing both will come down to infrastructure, and right now, the US doesn’t have the right kind of infrastructure.
Consumers have handed companies an enormous amount of power.
Companies know they’re operating with less consumer oversight than at any previous point in the history of payments. When payments happen automatically in the background, a price increase is easy to introduce without the customer knowing. One “your subscription price is going up” email is enough to check the compliance box. The amount changes on the next billing cycle, and unless the buyer is actively monitoring their statements or email, they may not notice for months. New fees follow the same logic, whether it is a streaming service adding a content delivery surcharge, a gym adding an app access fee or a subscription box adding handling costs. None of it requires the consumer to actively re-agree, because they already agreed when they signed up that the subscription price was subject to change.
The same dynamic extends to services the consumer never requested. For instance, free trials often convert to a paid plan without prompting, as the buyer agreed to it the moment they signed up.
None of this is an accident. It’s how automatic billing is designed to work. The sign-up experience is built to be fast and frictionless, and the ongoing billing relationship is designed to continue by default, with the burden on the consumer to notice a problem and act on it.
Businesses are following consumers toward cashless. Not everyone can follow.
Businesses are moving in the same direction: fast and frictionless is in.
Seventy-eight percent of business owners now say cash accounts for half or less of their transactions, and 10% have stopped accepting cash altogether. If you walk through enough coffee shops, parking garages or food halls in any major US city, you are bound to find a card-only sign at a register.
This is partly a consumer-preference response, but it’s also a practical calculation for the business, since cash requires physical handling and accounting.
The challenge is that accepting cards costs merchants a percentage of each transaction, often a flat fee plus 1.5% to 3.5%, depending on the card type and network, which is why merchants impose card minimums and surcharges.
For the 52% of Americans who still use cash specifically to avoid those fees, a card-only register is merely an inconvenience. But for the 5.9 million US households that remain unbanked, it is a closed door.
These people use cash because it is the only payment method they can access. As more businesses exit cash acceptance, the places those households can shop, pay bills and participate in everyday commerce get fewer.
Both problems trace back to the same infrastructure gap
The problem of unnoticed recurring charges and the problem of people locked out of a cashless society are both infrastructure problems, just different ones.
The visibility problem exists because recurring billing infrastructure isn’t designed to help people see what they have agreed to. It’s designed to do two things: process payments reliably and retain subscribers. There is no layer built into the system that shows a subscriber everything they are enrolled in across their payment methods, flags when a price has changed or makes cancellation as easy as signup. That gap is a design choice, and open banking frameworks that give consumers a consolidated view of their payment relationships are one of the few developments that directly address it.
The access problem is a different infrastructure failure entirely. In a system built around proprietary rails, participating in digital payments requires a relationship with a specific institution. You need a bank account to get a debit card, a linked account to fund a mobile wallet, a card on file to use most apps. For the millions of US households without that institutional starting point, the closed nature of the network is the barrier. That’s a structural problem, and it’s why cashless transactions are not arriving for everyone at the same pace.
What the US can learn from markets that chose differently
Brazil’s Pix launched in late 2020 as a mandated, free-for-individuals rail that every sizable financial institution was required to join. Within three years, Pix had processed more than 60 billion transactions, sharply reduced merchant fees and extended access to consumers who had previously been excluded from the formal payment system. India’s Unified Payments Interface operates on the same principle, functioning as an open layer that any bank, wallet or fintech can plug into, so that a customer of a small regional institution can pay anyone in the country as easily as if they shared the same app, even if they don’t. UPI now handles more than 10 billion transactions a month.
Neither system achieved its goal through voluntary industry cooperation or commercial agreements. Both got there because interoperability, the ability for money to move between any bank, app or network regardless of which provider sits on either end, was treated as a policy baseline rather than a feature to be negotiated.
The US has the beginning of a real-time rail in FedNow, with roughly 1,400 institutions now live.
The issue is, FedNow only connects bank accounts; it doesn’t touch the apps, wallets and fintech platforms where today’s consumers actually spend. Open banking frameworks point toward a solution here. By connecting across accounts and providers, they can give consumers a single view of every recurring payment they are enrolled in, flagging price changes or unfamiliar charges as they appear. The payments themselves can still run automatically. What open banking adds is a realistic way for consumers to see what is running on their behalf.
The payments industry has no shortage of investment. What it does have is a shortage of investment directed at outcomes that benefit consumers. Right now, the infrastructure being built makes it easier for companies to charge consumers without being noticed and harder for the unbanked to participate at all. Those are the results of decisions about what to prioritize, and they can be made differently.
A cashless economy built on open, interoperable rails with consumer visibility built in rather than bolted on would give Americans the low-effort payment experience they want without requiring them to give up oversight in exchange. The 51% ready to abandon cash and the 5.9 million who have no alternative are both waiting for the same thing: a payment system that was actually designed with them in mind.
