COPENHAGEN: For the first time in Denmark’s history, there were no bank robberies for the whole of last year, which authorities attributed to the trend towards cashless payments.
Denmark’s finance workers union said in a statement that the use of cash had declined in recent years, reporting no bank robberies.
Stan Lund Olson, vice president of the Finance Workers Union, while reacting to this positive situation, said that the rapidly growing trend of a cashless society has forced banks to reduce their cash-related services, which has led to robberies. So the potential opportunities for looting are very less.
He expressed his pleasant surprise that there was no bank robbery throughout the year and said that it is not less than a surprise because whenever such an incident occurs, the employees on the spot go through severe mental stress.
He said that it is a situation whose emotional impact you cannot even begin to understand until you have been through it yourself.
The finance workers’ union said there were 221 bank robberies in the country in 2000, which gradually declined to less than 10 per year after 2017.
According to data from Finance Denmark, there was only one bank robbery in Denmark in 2021.
Bank robberies have been on a steady decline since 2000, when there were 221 robberies, nearly every day that banks were open.
Denmark’s central bank reported in March last year that the use of cash has almost halved from 23 percent of payments in 2017 to 12 percent in 2021.
Citing data from the central bank, Bloomberg reported that cash withdrawals in the country have fallen by about 75 percent over the past six years, the central bank said, adding that the use of cash even during the Covid-19 pandemic. The process of giving up accelerated.
Denmark has a population of approximately 5.9 million and is regularly ranked among the happiest countries in the world, in 2022 it was the second happiest country on the list after Finland in the World Happiness Index report.