Macau Matters | Coin Concerns

Richard Whitfield

Everybody in the developed world is very familiar with the problems posed by coins. When you buy stuff with cash you pay mostly with notes and get change mostly in coins. As soon as you get home you drop the coins on your bedside table or some other place because they are heavy and clumsy to carry around, and they quickly wear holes in the bottoms of your pants pockets.

Then you periodically get rid of all your accumulated coins by giving them away to children or charities or, in civilised countries, depositing them at your local bank branch. Unfortunately, new arrivals in Macau and Hong Kong are often caught out when the bank refuses to accept their stash of coins, after standing for a long time in a bank queue. Shopkeepers also have considerable problems in getting coins from local banks – they are only available sometimes!

I have always been very annoyed by this practice, which is very easily resolved by requiring banks to always accept and distribute all values of legal currency as part of their licensing. Shame on the local monetary authorities for not enforcing such rules, as they do in most parts of the developed world.

I am sure that banks complain that handling coins is expensive, but my answer is that this is simply a reasonable cost of doing business. Also, nowadays, in most countries banks have automatic coin counting and dispensing machines so that the handling cost is minimal – why can’t Macau and Hong Kong banks buy some of these machines?

Another way to (at least partially) resolve this issue has been widely adopted in Hong Kong where Octopus debit cards can nearly always be used for purchases to give the merchant the exact amount. These debit cards were initially developed for use in public transport but have been extended to cover many different kinds of purchases in many different kinds of retail outlet. Octopus cards are also very easily “refilled” by electronic funds transfers. Again, the Macau monetary authority has had years of this example to follow and promote, but they have done very little so that MacauPass cards are still not widely enough used, and they can only be “refilled” in limited ways.

In many other parts of the world the use of small purchase debit cards (like Octopus) are being supplanted by smartphone Apps that contain an electronic wallet and near-field or wifi communications technologies are used to communicate with merchant equipment and transfer funds securely at the point of sale. When buying something using these technologies, people simply wave their smartphone near a reader (and possibly give an authorisation code) to make a payment. Again, the Macau monetary authority and the local banks seem to be dragging their heals in legally authorising and setting up these systems for locals and tourists to use.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but Macau should be positioning itself as a showcase for the latest and greatest “21^st century” technologies for making life easier and more sustainable. We are small and rich so we can afford to do it, and we have a very large tourist population that will be impressed at how modern life is in Macau. These tourists will also create regional demand for implementing the technologies showcased in Macau which will open up opportunities for consulting and other exportable services. This is the best way that I can think of for diversifying Macau’s economy. What is holding us back?