This is a crappy loud thinking post.
5-10 Years ago, before the Banking revolution, nobody would have believed that anyone could prefer cheque/card/Electronic Fund Transfer over Hard Cash. But here we are in the 21st Century.
Here are some real life situations that I can recall where people preferred banks over cash. If you remember any other unique situation, then let me know.
eg:
1) My credit card company does not accept cash. If one has to make a payment, we better pay via Demand Draft or Cheque.
2) A friend of mine was roaming around the office with a 100k in cash. His concern was that he was due for an EMI cheque payment on a housing loan and although 3 of his friends were ready to give a short term cash advance to him, but nobody wanted him to hand over this bundle of cash in lieu of the EFT (to ensure that his housing cheque did not bounce)
3) Citibank issues/accepts Demand Draft for free from its account holders. But when my father went to their branch to do a cash deposit. It slapped me with a 150/- teller charge.
4) I went to a travel agency to book my thailand trip tickets. Due to some weired reason, one of my group mate offered to pay for his expenses through cash (instead of cheque like everybody else) Initially the travel agent resisted accepting cash. But later on, to my surprise, he took cash… then went to a bank and issued a DD for the same amount and then entered the DD number into his database.
I wonder if the cashless payments are so much in vogue (esp for large legal transactions), why people resisted it earlier.