17 August 2026 by Mondo2.0

Buy one click, Buy Now Pay Later: Invisible money

Money is not only an economic instrument: it is also a cognitive and social object. The way we use it influences our perception of value, spending and debt. For centuries its representation was material: coins and banknotes had weight and substance, and paying meant physically transferring value to others.

Digitalization is progressively breaking this relationship between economic value and sensory perception.

Today we bring a card or smartphone close to a terminal, buy with one click, use automatically charged services or purchase immediately while postponing payment. The economic value of the transaction remains the same; what changes is its psychological representation.

This is not only a technological change. When the way we use money changes, the way we perceive it changes as well.

The reflection is not new. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel had already identified money as one of the most powerful instruments of abstraction in modern society: it makes it possible to compare different objects, activities and experiences by assigning them a numerical value.

Digitalization adds another level to this abstraction: we no longer necessarily exchange an object that represents value, but information that certifies the transfer of that value.

Paying 120 euros by handing over six twenty-euro banknotes means seeing money concretely decrease. Tapping a card or smartphone produces the same economic result through a gesture almost identical to the one we might use to pay 5 euros. In digital payment, the physical gesture no longer communicates, by itself, the economic scale of the expense.

The real innovation of digital payments lies in the progressive disappearance of the moment of payment itself.

The smartphone is probably the most advanced point of this transformation: it brings together payment tools, documents, tickets, loyalty cards, photographs, keys and identification systems. At the same time, the wallet is disappearing, even though it also represented part of our social identity.

Convenience increases, but so does dependence on a single point of access to digital life.

The progressive invisibility of money also changes the perception of spending.

In behavioral economics, the term pain of paying refers to the negative psychological component associated with the moment when we part with our money. In digital payments this separation becomes less physical and, especially in repeated small transactions, the total amount spent may become less evident.

The transformation becomes even more significant when not only purchase and the materiality of money are separated, but also purchase and the moment of payment.

This is the case with digital installment plans and Buy Now Pay Later. The principle is simple: buy today and pay later, often by dividing the amount into several installments. It can be a useful tool for financial flexibility, but it changes the way the price is perceived.

A 600-euro product may stop appearing as a 600-euro expense and turn into a sequence of smaller amounts. If the mechanism is applied simultaneously to several purchases, it also becomes less intuitive to understand how much future income has already been committed. The problem, therefore, is not installment payment itself, but the possible psychological distance between desire, consumption and economic sacrifice.

When payment becomes invisible and debt is fragmented over time, the psychological weight of indebtedness may also become less visible.

The digitalization of money produces another consequence, this time collective: every electronic payment leaves a trace. And this is where technological change meets one of the structural problems of the Italian economy, tax evasion.

Since January 1, 2026, businesses have been required to associate electronic payment instruments with their electronic cash registers, a requirement that became fully operational in the following months. The association is not physical: it takes place through the infrastructure of the Italian Revenue Agency and makes it possible to compare what is recorded as a sale with what is actually paid electronically.

According to data reported by Corriere della Sera in July 2026, aligning electronic cash registers with electronic payment instruments would have brought to light, in the first half of the year, about 9.1 billion euros of additional taxable income compared with the same period of the previous year, together with about 160 million additional commercial documents.

The figure must be interpreted with caution: it does not mean that 9.1 billion euros of tax evasion were automatically recovered, nor that every additional receipt depends exclusively on the new system. Applying an average VAT rate of 18%, the additional taxable base could correspond to almost 1.6 billion euros of additional VAT potentially due, but the tax actually paid depends on many other variables.

From a sociological point of view, the interesting point is another: when a transaction becomes traceable, the behavior of the individuals involved may change.

Electronic payment does not physically prevent someone from failing to record a transaction; however, it introduces an independent trace against which that record can be compared. If electronic payments emerge without a plausible correspondence in declared receipts, the anomaly becomes observable. Technology thus changes behavior not only through prohibitions, but also through the possibility of control.

The emerging model is that of an increasingly data-driven tax administration: cross-checking information, identifying anomalies and carrying out targeted controls. The link between POS systems and electronic cash registers makes these information bases easier to compare.

The more money becomes invisible to our eyes, the more visible its traces become to the systems that circulate it.

Digitalization also changes the geography of risk. Carrying less cash reduces some traditional risks related to loss, theft and, especially for businesses, the need to physically store and transfer sums of money. But it would be wrong to conclude that digitalization eliminates every risk: it transfers it.

Cyber fraud, phishing, credential theft, social engineering and user manipulation belong to a different universe from wallet theft, but they can produce equally concrete economic consequences.

The latest data from the Bank of Italy nevertheless indicate a limited phenomenon compared with the overall volume of transactions. In the second half of 2025, the value of fraudulent transactions considered in the report amounted overall to about 3 euros for every 100,000 euros transacted; for cards it rises to 17 euros per 100,000, while for ordinary bank transfers it is about 2 euros.

The nature of fraud is also changing. In bank transfers, one of the main problems is payer manipulation: someone does not necessarily breach the system technically, but convinces the victim to voluntarily make the payment to the wrong recipient. For cards and electronic money, unauthorized transactions and data theft remain important.

In this scenario, security depends less and less on the ability to physically safeguard something and increasingly on our skills.

Recognizing a fraudulent message, protecting credentials, using authentication correctly and understanding when a request is suspicious become forms of economic security behavior. Managing one’s money increasingly means knowing how to manage the technology through which we access it.

This brings us perhaps to the most important social consequence of the transformation.

What for some represents an extraordinary simplification may become a new barrier for others. Income, education, access to financial services, connectivity, digital skills and trust in technological systems affect the ability to use these tools autonomously.

For a long time we used the term digital divide to describe the gap between those who had access to the Internet and those who were excluded. Then we understood that having a connection did not necessarily mean knowing how to use it. Now the same dynamic could extend to money.

The ability to pay is also becoming a digital skill.

The paradox is clear. We can pay anywhere, buy a ticket while walking or transfer money to the other side of the world. But this simplicity rests on a complex infrastructure: devices, digital identities, banks, intermediaries, authentication, networks and databases.

It is the progressive transfer of money from our material experience to an infrastructure that we can barely see.

And perhaps it is precisely this invisibility that makes the transformation so profound. As the act of payment becomes smaller, faster and almost imperceptible, the psychological and social consequences behind that act increase.

We have not only changed the way we pay: we are changing the way we perceive money, debt, risk and our own participation in economic life.

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