The weaknesses of a digital economy

No Silver Bullet on Closing the Digital Access Gap | Economic Empowerment | GZERO Media

Is there any downside to going cashless?

Not really, but there are challenges, Usman Ahmed, head of Global Public Affairs and Strategic Research at PayPal, says during a livestream conversation on closing the global digital gap hosted by GZERO in partnership with Visa.

On the one hand, digitizing payment allows the creation of other financial services around it — mainly access to finance for the unbanked. On the other, there are privacy and security concerns, although these also exist with cash.

Overall, though, Ahmed believes that going digital is something that nobody will solve on their own. Governments and the private sector need to work together, and digital access is useless without digital literacy.

More from GZERO Media

A robot waiter, serving drinks at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, in Paris, on May 24, 2024.

  • Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, speaking your order into your menu, and immediately watching a robot arrive with your food. Imagine the food being made quickly, precisely — and without a human involved, because the entire restaurant is fully roboticized.

- YouTube

Forget the fancy cars, futuristic gadgets, and martinis “shaken, not stirred.” In his book "Sell Like a Spy: The Art of Persuasion from the World of Espionage", Jeremy Hurewitz tells GZERO's Tony Maciulis that intelligence officers are a lot more like therapists than James Bond-style action heroes.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI, Rama Duwaji, MIRA NAIR, MAMOOD MAMDANI during an election night event at The Brooklyn Paramount Theater in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
(Photo by Neil Constantine/NurPhoto)

Last Tuesday, a self-identified democratic socialist who ran on making New York affordable for the 99% won the city’s mayoral race in a landslide, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. And the reactions have been predictably hysterical.

A fruit and vegetable stall is lit by small lamps during a blackout in a residential neighborhood in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 6, 2025, after massive Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure in October.
(Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto)

As a fourth winter of war approaches, Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy grid faster than it can be rebuilt.