Stockholm’s street magazine vendors no longer need to ask if passers-by can spare some change anymore – they take cards instead.

In the most cashless society on the planet, sellers of Sweden’s answer to the Big Issue have been equipped with portable card readers to accept virtual payments.

“More and more sellers were telling us that people wanted a copy of the magazine but weren’t carrying cash,” says Pia Stolt of Situation Stockholm, the street paper sold by homeless vendors in Sweden’s capital. “It got to the point where we had to do something, so we worked with Stockholm-based mobile payments company iZettle and came up with a way to sell the magazine electronically.

“We didn’t know how it would turn out, or whether people would be reluctant to give their credit card information to a homeless person,” says Stolt, “but the results have been great – vendors’ sales are up 59%.”

“Swedes are pretty trusting and we’re used to embracing new technology so this was the perfect solution,” says Stolt. “The cashless society campaign we’re seeing in Sweden is definitely a good move as far as we are concerned – it’s unstoppable.”

The country’s highest-profile cash-free campaigner is Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus. After his son was robbed several years ago, Ulvaeus became an evangelist for the electronic payment movement, claiming that cash was the primary cause of crime and that “all activity in the black economy requires cash”.

The man who composed Money, Money, Money has been living cash-free for more than a year and says the only thing he misses is “a coin to borrow a trolley at the supermarket”. Abba the Museum has operated cash-free since opening in May 2013 and Ulvaeus says Sweden “could and should be the first cashless society in the world”.

Four out of five purchases are now made electronically in Sweden, according to associate professor of industrial dynamics at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, Niklas Arvidsson – and going totally cash-free is the next step. “Banks and merchants invested heavily in card payment systems in the 1990s and these days consumers are used to it,” says Arvidsson.

While London’s buses went cash-free earlier this year, bus fares disappeared several years ago in Stockholm after public transport unions declared that handling cash had become a “work environment problem”.

“Bus drivers were getting attacked for their fares and so Stockholm banned cash on public transport,” says Arvidsson. “There was also a spate of bank robberies, so four years ago, the banks began to move away from cash. Now, five of Sweden’s six big banks – all except Handelsbanken – operate cash free wherever possible.” The Swedish financial sector has become more cost efficient and the number of armed robberies has hit a 30-year low, according to the Swedish Bankers’ Association. “People trust each other, the government and the banks more in Sweden,” says Arvidsson, “plus we have very little corruption – so we don’t need to have physical cash in our hands to feel safe.”

The drive to a cashless society is supported by the UN Capital Development Fund’s Better Than Cash Alliance which aims to accelerate the shift to electronic payments, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MasterCard and Visa among others. But it’s Sweden that is blazing the trail.

“We’re leading the world in cashless trading,” says Bengt Nilervall from the Swedish Federation of Trade. “It’s safer this way and it saves us money, as handling money and transporting cash is costly. The Payment Card Industry [PCI] has taken many security measures to ensure that people are safe and we have good protection in place, so Swedes feel confident paying electronically.”

There is, however, concern about how well Sweden’s 1.8 million pensioners – out of a total population of 10m – will adapt. “A lot of elderly people feel excluded when you need to use cash cards or your mobile phone to take a bus or use public toilets,” says Johanna Hållén of the Swedish National Pensioners’ Organisation. “Only 50% of our members use cash-cards everywhere and 7% never use cash-cards. So we want the government to take things slowly.”

The digital payment revolution is also a challenge for tourists, who need pre-paid tickets or a mobile registered in Sweden to catch a bus in the capital. Many have also endured mild chaos at the one of the country’s first cashless festivals this summer when the payment system broke down and people ended up resorting to old-fashioned IOUs.

“There’s a worry about fraud as well,” says Stockholm based private security expert Björn Ericsson. “With figures from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention showing that fraud has more than doubled in the last decade.”

In light of the NSA revelations, some are uncomfortable about the idea that big businesses can trace their every electronic footprint. “But most Swedes do rely on ‘the system’,” says Ericsson, “I seldom hear anybody talk about Snowden and the circumstances around the [NSA] matter anymore.”

The one thing that may put the brakes on a brave new cash-free world is Swedes’ sentimentality when it comes to their coins and notes. “A recent survey I worked on showed that two-thirds of Swedes think carrying cash is a human right,” says Arvidsson. “We like having our own currency and it fits in with the identity of being a Swede; we’re even releasing new banknotes in 2015. So people like to know their cash is there, even if they don’t necessarily use it.”

Sweden’s other firsts

1661 First bank notes in Europe introduced

1718 Women granted right to vote in Age of Liberty [although universal suffrage doesn’t arrive until 1921]

1955 Ikea sells first flatpack furniture

1971 ABBA formed, becoming the first group from a non-English speaking country to achieve global success (and fleetingly make flared catsuits cool)

2008 Inaugural commercial music streaming service, Spotify, launches

2014 Sweden awarded first place at the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report for advances in digital technology and ranked first for sustainability in the Global Green Economy Index