On 4 March 2026, Sweden's Riksbank published new recommendations for public payment preparedness. The headline recommendation: every Swedish adult should keep SEK 1,000 (approximately EUR 85) in cash at home, in multiple denominations, sufficient to cover a week's essential purchases. Citizens should also maintain at least two payment cards from different networks, such as one Visa and one Mastercard. And they should use cash at regular intervals during normal times to keep cash-handling infrastructure operational.

This is a central bank in the world's most cashless advanced economy - where only about 8 percent of point-of-sale transactions are conducted in cash - telling its citizens to hold physical banknotes and actively use them to prevent the cash system from atrophying. The paradox is instructive for every country that is racing to digitise payments without considering what happens when the digital layer fails.

The March 2026 recommendations are comprehensive and unusually direct for a central bank communication. They include seven elements:

Cash holdings: SEK 1,000 per adult at home, in multiple denominations; Dual-network card access: At least two cards from different networks (e.g. Visa and Mastercard); Regular cash usage: Use cash periodically to keep cash infrastructure functioning; Offline payment capability: Support for card payments without internet connectivity (linked to the July 2026 offline mandate); Instant payment expansion: Service providers should expand instant payment offerings; Cross-border payment improvements: International payments require acceleration and cost reduction; E-krona investigation: The government should establish a formal inquiry into a digital central bank currency. The legal basis is the Sveriges Riksbank Act (2022:1568), which assigns the Riksbank responsibility for civil preparedness in payments - ensuring the public can make payments in peacetime crisis situations and heightened alert states.

The Geopolitical Context

The Riksbank's language is carefully calibrated but unmistakable. The recommendations cite "the current international situation" and Sweden's "high degree of digitalisation" as creating potential vulnerabilities. The general public is described as "an important part of Sweden's total defence."

Sweden joined NATO in March 2024, following Finland's accession in April 2023. Both countries' applications were directly prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Nordic-Baltic region is now a fully integrated NATO area for the first time, and the Swedish government's broader civil preparedness messaging has become increasingly explicit about the risk of armed conflict.

A 2023 incident underscored the vulnerability: a severed undersea cable between Finland and Estonia cut electricity by two-thirds, demonstrating how infrastructure disruptions can cascade across the region. With Sweden's near-total reliance on electronic payments, a sustained disruption to telecommunications or power infrastructure could effectively disable the ability to purchase essential goods.

The Offline Payment Mandate

The March 2026 cash recommendations complement a separate but related initiative: the Riksbank's agreement with the Swedish payment industry to enable offline card payments for essential goods by 1 July 2026.

Under the offline mandate, card terminals must be able to authorise payments using the card's EMV chip and PIN without contacting the acquirer or card issuer, for a limited amount, for up to seven days of disruption. The customer inserts the physical card (contactless will not work), enters their PIN, and the chip authorises the transaction locally.

This is technically straightforward but operationally complex. It requires: Issuers to configure cards with offline authorisation capability and appropriate floor limits Acquirers to deploy terminals with offline storage and later batch processing Merchants to accept the credit risk of processing transactions without real-time authorisation All parties to agree on liability frameworks for offline transactions

The scope is deliberately limited to essential goods - food, medicine, and fuel - at physical retail locations. This is not a general-purpose offline payment system; it is a civil preparedness measure.

Sweden's Unique Vulnerability

Sweden's position is unusual among advanced economies. The share of cash in point-of-sale transactions has fallen from over 70 percent in 2007 to approximately 8 percent in 2025. Many Swedish businesses have gone entirely cashless. Some bank branches no longer handle cash at all. The infrastructure for cash distribution - ATMs, cash-in-transit services, bank cash processing centres - has contracted in parallel.

This creates a circularity problem that the Riksbank explicitly acknowledges: if nobody uses cash, the infrastructure for distributing, accepting, and processing cash degrades. If the infrastructure degrades, cash becomes less available when it is needed most. The Riksbank's recommendation to "use cash at regular intervals during normal times" is an attempt to prevent the cash system from falling below the minimum viable scale needed for emergency use.

Denmark faces a similar dynamic, though with somewhat higher cash usage. Norway has legislated that banks must continue to provide cash services, addressing the infrastructure decay problem through regulation rather than recommendation. Finland, as a eurozone member with higher residual cash usage, faces less immediate pressure but has raised similar concerns through the Bank of Finland.

The Dual-Network Recommendation

The recommendation to hold cards on two different networks deserves particular attention. It reflects a sophisticated understanding of payment system failure modes.

If a single card network - say, Visa - experiences a processing outage (as Visa did across Europe in 2018, leaving millions of cardholders unable to pay), holders of a second card on a different network can continue transacting. The Riksbank is effectively asking citizens to build redundancy into their personal payment infrastructure, the same principle that central banks apply to systemically important payment systems.

This is unusual advice from a central bank and implicitly acknowledges that no single payment system - including the central bank's own infrastructure - can guarantee 100 percent availability. Resilience comes from diversity of payment methods, not from perfecting any single method.

Implications for Other Countries

Sweden is the most extreme case, but the underlying dynamic applies to every economy where digital payments are growing rapidly.

The UK, where cash usage has fallen to approximately 12 percent of transactions, faces similar infrastructure decay risks. The FCA has taken a regulatory approach, requiring banks to maintain reasonable access to cash, and the UK government has legislated cash access protections.

Australia, where the Reserve Bank's 2025 review noted that cash use had fallen to 13 percent, is debating similar measures alongside its broader payments reform.

The common lesson is that cash functions as a systemic backup - a payment method that requires no electricity, no telecommunications, no internet, and no third-party authorisation. Allowing the infrastructure that supports it to atrophy creates a single point of failure in the national payment system: total dependence on digital infrastructure that is vulnerable to cyber attack, natural disaster, power failure, or conflict.

The Riksbank's recommendations amount to an admission that Sweden moved too fast toward cashlessness without adequately considering resilience. The July 2026 offline payment mandate and the March 2026 cash preparedness recommendations together represent a course correction - not away from digital payments, but toward a more resilient payment ecosystem that maintains fallback capabilities.

For payments architects and risk managers across Europe, the Swedish experience provides a clear case study: the optimal payment system is not the most digital one, but the most resilient one.

Sources: Sveriges Riksbank - New Recommendations for Public Payment Preparedness (4 March 2026); Sveriges Riksbank - Offline Card Payments Should Be Possible No Later Than 1 July 2026; Sveriges Riksbank - Recommendations to the General Public Regarding Payments; Sveriges Riksbank - Increased Possibilities to Make Offline Card Payments in Sweden (October 2025 Memo).