Cashback, goodbye to the state one comes the private one

State cashback will not return in 2022; the Council of Ministers has chosen to allocate resources to other expenditure items. Yet, as the analysis of Facile.it shows, the initiative seemed to appeal to consumers and concretely contributed to bringing Italians closer to electronic money, so much so that, by examining a sample of 50,000 requests, the comparator found, in the first half of the year 2021, a 39% increase in the number of searches for prepaid cards, with significant growth especially in the consumer segment up to 34 years of age. The data from Facile.it are strengthened by those that show how, in the first half of 2021, the number of digital payments grew by 41% reaching 3.2 billion, for a total of over 145 billion euros, with an average receipt down, also thanks to cashback, by over 11% to reach 45.7 euros (Innovative payments Observatory, school of management of the Politecnico di Milano). Many have criticized the effectiveness of cashback in the fight against tax evasion, one of the reasons that prompted the previous government to introduce the mechanism. It was certainly not a priority for the Italians; already in 2019, Facile.it had highlighted, through a survey entrusted to the mUp Research institute, that of the 22.4 million citizens unwilling to abandon cash, almost 6 out of 10 respondents would have renounced it only in the face of a a form of reimbursement such as cashback, while less than 1 in 3 would have done so to contribute to the fight against tax evasion. However, the cashback formula is not destined to fade and indeed, precisely following the success achieved by the state initiative, several credit institutions have understood its potential and have made it their own. “As long as – explains Ivano Cresto, managing director financial products of Facile.it – ​​the state initiative remained in force, some credit institutions integrated the official state cashback app into their home banking, helping thus its customers to participate in the initiative; now that the state cashback is no longer in force, some banks have chosen to propose their own cashback mechanism, with the aim of continuing to encourage the use of electronic payments by the customers “. The mechanism promoted by the credit institutions and mentioned by Cresto normally provides for a refund of a variable amount against a payment made with an electronic card. The percentage varies from bank to bank; in some cases an initial cashback is generally recognized of 10%, which then tends to decrease over time to 1%, while in other cases a fixed amount is reimbursed for each transaction made.