For the RTW FutureBiz Conference, I was asked a question that sounds simple until you start digging deeper: are face-to-face transactions becoming a thing of the past?
Before I get to my take, ask yourself this. What have you already bought in person today? A coffee on the way in, perhaps. A paper, or a sandwich at lunch. Or maybe nothing at all, and everything you’ve bought arrived in a cardboard box or as a notification on your phone. Whatever your answer, I’d bet it’s very different from the one you’d have given ten years ago.
We all move between the physical and the digital without giving it a second thought. The real question is what that means for our high streets, our town centres and the businesses in them.
To get to an answer, I broke my thinking down into three smaller questions. (If you’d rather hear me talk through this, the video presentation is below.)
1. Are consumer habits changing?
The obvious place to start is shopping, where the shift from physical to digital has been most visible.
The Office for National Statistics has tracked internet sales as a share of all retail in Great Britain since 2006. For well over a decade the line climbs steadily, from under 5% to around 20% by the start of 2020. Then the pandemic hits, and in early 2021 it spikes to nearly 38%. For a moment, it looked as though the high street’s worst fears were coming true.
Then the line came back down. For the last couple of years it has been remarkably flat, sitting at around 27 to 28%. Roughly three quarters of retail spending still happens somewhere other than a website or an app.
What has changed is the way the two work together. We browse on our phones and buy in store. We order online and collect in person. We spot something in a shop and order it later from the sofa. The industry calls it bricks and clicks, and the most successful retailers now treat it as one journey. We pick whichever channel suits us at that moment, and often we barely notice which one came first.
The generational picture adds another layer. Millennials were the first to adopt online shopping as a regular habit. As many of them have moved into parenthood, local and community impact has become a bigger factor in how they spend.
Gen Z, now roughly 14 to 29 years old, is where it gets really interesting. You’d expect the first generation raised on smartphones to live entirely online. They don’t. They want a balance of online and in-person experiences, and they’re strongly values-driven, favouring brands with a clear purpose and a positive impact on the world around them.
Then there’s music. Rolling Stone reported this month that US CD sales rose 16% in the first half of 2026, driven largely by Gen Z and millennial buyers. K-pop accounts for a good chunk of that, but the wider point stands: a generation that grew up with streaming is choosing to own something it can hold. When everything is available instantly and invisibly, the physical, the tangible and the local start to carry a new kind of value.
So yes, habits are changing. But people seem to be looking for a healthier balance between real-life experience, ownership and the convenience digital offers, rather than abandoning one for the other.
2. Is this the end of cash?
Earlier this year, LINK published Keeping Choice Alive, a survey of 1,116 high street small businesses supported by the Federation of Small Businesses, the Post Office and PayPoint. One in seven said they had gone cashless in the past year.
Their reasons were practical: fraud prevention, security concerns and a lack of customer demand. Cash has to be counted, stored, banked and insured. For a small business on thin margins, card and phone payments are simply easier.
The same survey tells the other side of the story. 77% of those businesses still accept cash, and 46% of their in-person transactions are still made with it. Cash isn’t disappearing overnight, whatever the headlines suggest.
That’s because plenty of people still rely on it: older residents, people on tight budgets who use it to manage their spending, people without a bank account, and people who simply value the privacy it gives them. When a business goes card-only, some customers won’t notice. Others will quietly stop coming.
Cash has also always been a reason to visit a town centre in the first place: to go to the bank, use a cash machine or pay at the post office. That will continue for now, and even as cash declines, it won’t necessarily mean the end of face-to-face payments.
3. Is the role of money itself changing?
This is the question I think will have the biggest impact over the next few years, and the one most people haven’t caught up with yet.
Stablecoins. You’ll be hearing this word a lot more. A stablecoin is a form of digital money, issued by a private company, backed by safe assets and designed to always be worth exactly the same as the currency it tracks. For a sterling stablecoin, that’s one pound.
In June, the Bank of England set out how it will regulate sterling stablecoins that are widely used for payments, with the UK regime due to begin in 2027. Issuers will be able to hold up to 70% of their backing in short-term UK government debt, with the rest held as deposits at the Bank so they can pay people out promptly. Each coin will initially be capped at £40 billion of issuance, and holders can’t be paid interest.
Why should a high street care? On the plus side, these new digital rails could make payments close to instant and close to free. For a small business paying card fees on every sale, that’s a real saving.
On the other hand, we don’t yet know what new dynamics this could bring to local economies. Large retailers such as supermarkets could become stablecoin issuers themselves. Interest is banned, but rewards tied to spending rather than holding may still be allowed. It isn’t hard to picture a scheme that encourages shoppers to keep a balance with a big chain and spend it there, rather than with the independent retailer down the road.
None of this is a distant prospect. This week, on 30 September, the Financial Conduct Authority opens its authorisation gateway for firms that want to operate under the UK’s new crypto-asset regime, which comes into force in October 2027. In the early days I’d expect banks, fintechs and crypto firms to lead the way. How it plays out locally is still an open question, and the government, industry bodies and companies like ours will be watching closely.
Agentic commerce. Many of you will already use ChatGPT or Claude. This is another level. The big tech and payments firms are building standards that let AI agents shop on our behalf: Stripe and OpenAI launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol last year, and Google and Shopify followed with the Universal Commerce Protocol in January.
Picture this. Your phone notices a friend’s birthday in your calendar. It searches for gift ideas based on what it knows you like, compares price, delivery times and availability, suggests a shortlist and pays for your choice, quite possibly using the kind of fast, programmable money I’ve just described. The same approach will book tables and flights, and restock your fridge and your wardrobe. Before long, most things bought online will be bought this way.
For local businesses, that raises an uncomfortable but very practical question. If an AI agent can’t find you, can’t understand what you sell and can’t pay you, then for that customer you don’t exist. Agents will need your product range, services and opening hours in a form they can read and act on.
So is the role of money changing? Fundamentally. It’s becoming faster, cheaper, programmable and increasingly handled by software rather than people.
The social value of a transaction
Shopping has become blended. Cash is still with us, though declining. And soon our AI assistants will be doing some of the buying with new kinds of digital money. But money also has a social purpose that’s easy to overlook.
The government’s latest Community and Engagement Survey found that 7% of adults in England feel lonely often or always. That’s more than three million people.
Local businesses don’t just sell things. They’re some of the most important spaces for wellbeing we have. The pharmacist who notices a regular customer looking unwell. The grocer who knows everyone by name. The café owner who has your usual order ready before you reach the counter. Each of those is a transaction, and each is also contact, routine and a sense of belonging. Together they make up a big part of the social fabric that communities are built on.
As automation and social media take up more of our time, and more of our buying happens without speaking to anyone, people are looking for ways to reconnect. We’re seeing more community groups, more wellbeing walks and more events built around simply being together. The more of life we automate, the more valuable real human contact becomes. It turns into a premium experience, and many people are prepared to pay more, or travel further, for it.
What this means for your place
For anyone responsible for businesses, high streets or town centres, I’d suggest three priorities, one for each of the questions above.
Be findable everywhere. Businesses need to be visible online, in apps and increasingly to AI agents. That means accurate, up-to-date information about what’s open, what’s on and what’s for sale.
Accept every way to pay. Keep cash available for those who rely on it, so nobody is shut out of their own town centre, while getting ready for the new forms of digital money on the way.
Sell the experience. If people can buy almost anything from their sofa, the reason to come into town has to be something a screen can’t give them: service, expertise, events, atmosphere and connection. That’s where town centres can win.
So, is this the end of face-to-face transactions? I don’t believe it is. Digital and physical are already intertwined, and as payments get easier, faster and more invisible, the human interaction around them is likely to become more valuable. The opportunity is to use technology to help people discover, engage with and visit our town centres, and to make sure there’s something worth coming for when they arrive.
If technology is put to work on behalf of local people, this will be good news for our town centres and high streets.