Italy's Digital Payments-GDP Study: What It Means for Guyana and Jamaica

Bank of Italy data found that a 10 per cent rise in card payments lifts GDP by 0.33 per cent. In Guyana, where 99.9 per cent of transactions are cash and the cost runs to 2.45 per cent of GDP, the same elasticity points to a larger prize, and a larger risk.
By Theon Alleyne

A Bank of Italy study found that a 10 per cent rise in card payments lifts national GDP by 0.33 per cent. Applied to Guyana and Jamaica, the math suggests a far larger growth dividend than Italy itself stands to capture.

What did the Bank of Italy actually find?

Anna Mulassano, reporting in Il Sole 24 ORE, summarised a Bank of Italy paper that quantified the relationship between paperless payment adoption and economic performance. The study reports that a 10 per cent increase in card payments lifts Italian GDP by 0.33 per cent. For account-to-account (A2A) payments, the same 10 per cent increase delivers a 0.42 per cent GDP rise.

The study sits inside a country that is still moving to digital. In 2023, the average Italian made 219 non-cash payments per capita, against 365 across the EU and 395 in the eurozone. In Italian shops, cash still represented 61 per cent of transactions, with cards at 32 per cent and mobile apps at 4 per cent. Sixty-one per cent of Italian consumers said they preferred card or digital payments. Only 20 per cent preferred cash. The behavioural gap between stated preference and observed point-of-sale behaviour is itself the engine of the study.

In other words, Italy is partway up the curve. The Bank of Italy elasticity captures what happens at that midpoint.

How does this apply to Guyana?

Guyana is not at Italy's midpoint. It is at the bottom of the curve.

La Caribeña News reported this week that close to 99.9 per cent of Guyanese transactions are conducted in cash, citing World Bank data. The cost of operating that cash economy runs to roughly 2.45 per cent of GDP. The Bank of Guyana, working under the National Payments System Act of 2018, is now building a national tap-to-pay system that would route domestic retail flows through a real-time digital backbone.

Apply Italy's elasticity naively and the projection looks transformative. A move from a 0.1 per cent card share to a 10 per cent card share is a hundredfold increase. Italy's coefficient would imply a GDP uplift in the low single-digit per cent range from card adoption alone, before A2A rails are counted. Guyana's projected GDP for 2025 sits in the US$25 billion range, on World Bank trajectory. Even a 1.5 per cent uplift sized off that base is roughly US$375 million in additional output annually, sustained.

The naive projection is the wrong number. Italy's elasticity is calibrated against an economy with developed merchant infrastructure, an entrenched banking population, and a mature anti-fraud apparatus. Guyana has none of those at scale yet. The actual coefficient for a country moving from a near-pure cash economy is unknown. It could be larger, because the recovered cost of cash is higher. It could be smaller, because rails take time to thicken. The honest answer is that no one has measured it for an economy at Guyana's starting point.

There is also the demand side, which Italian readers do not face. La Caribeña News covered the ECONOME Business Conference at West Central Mall Theatre on 26 April 2026, where 120 entrepreneurs and professionals gathered around the message that Region Three is open for business. The room covered logistics, agro-processing, housing, mobility, and tourism. None of those sectors scale on cash. A coastal region selling to a Georgetown buyer or an export client cannot run on physical bills moving along a road. Digital payment rails are the precondition for the demand side that the conference room represented.

How does this apply to Jamaica?

Jamaica sits in a different position again, and the relevant lever is different.

The Bank of Jamaica launched JAM-DEX, the country's central bank digital currency, in mid-2022. Jamaica was the first Caribbean country to deploy a retail CBDC. The objective stated by the central bank at launch was to widen financial inclusion among unbanked Jamaicans, lower the cost of in-country transfers, and digitise small-merchant flows that the commercial banking system had not absorbed. Adoption since launch has been slower than the central bank's projections, but the rails exist.

What Italy's study implies for Jamaica is that the limiting factor is not infrastructure. It is throughput. Italy has cards, terminals, banking penetration, and consumer preference, and still its A2A payments per capita are 40 per cent below the EU average. Italy's growth dividend is being held back by behavioural friction, not technology gaps. Jamaica's case is the same. The CBDC is built. The merchant network is being expanded. What converts that infrastructure into the 0.33 per cent or 0.42 per cent GDP coefficient is sustained transaction volume, and sustained transaction volume comes from confidence and habit.

Jamaica also has a feature Italy does not: a remittance economy. According to Bank of Jamaica data released in March 2025, the country received US$3.36 billion in remittance inflows in 2024, equal to roughly 17 per cent of GDP. That figure marks the third consecutive year of slight decline from the 2021 peak of US$3.5 billion, and the United States accounted for over 67 per cent of the total. Every percentage point of that remittance volume that shifts from cash collection to JAM-DEX or to commercial bank digital channels has a direct, measurable GDP effect through reduced friction costs. The Bank of Italy elasticity is silent on this. The remittance multiplier is Jamaica's specific edge, and the channel through which it lands is what determines whether the multiplier is captured or lost to cash-handling friction.

What would the Caribbean math look like at scale?

If Caribbean economies as a group moved cash share from the regional average down to Italy's current 61 per cent at point of sale, the cumulative GDP uplift across CARICOM would, on Italy's coefficient, sit in the low-tens of billions of US dollars over a decade. The number is theoretical and elastic to dozens of inputs. It is also large enough that the policy conversation belongs at finance-minister level, not at central-bank-technical level.

The pattern fits a broader Caribbean fintech and capital-markets posture in which the region is increasingly designing forward, not retrofitting backward. WapiPay's recent expansion into Jamaica's US$2.5 billion remittance market is one signal. The Bank of Guyana's tap-to-pay rollout is another. The capacity to absorb the GDP uplift Italy is now measuring exists. The unknown is the speed of the behavioural shift.

What is the catch?

Fraud scales with the rails. The same La Caribeña News reporting on Guyana's payments rollout cited GuidePoint Security's finding of a 150 per cent increase in ghost tapping claims over the past year, and Juniper Research's projection that contactless payment volume reaches US$18.1 trillion globally by 2030, up from US$7.7 trillion in 2025. NFC ticketing alone is forecast to grow 300 per cent over five years.

Guyana's Financial Intelligence Unit recorded 208 Suspicious Transaction Reports in its 2024 Annual Report, a 15.6 per cent increase over 2023. General fraud cases more than doubled in the same period, from 28 to 60. The total dollar value of suspicious transactions fell by over 90 per cent, which means the fraud is moving down-market into smaller, more frequent attempts, the kind that ride the rails Italy's study credits with GDP growth.

The growth dividend and the fraud surface are the same surface. A Caribbean digital payments policy that captures the GDP uplift Italy now has data on must, in the same plan, fund the consumer-protection and AML infrastructure that catches fraud at small-ticket scale. Otherwise the dividend is paid out one way and clawed back the other.

Bottom line

The Bank of Italy did not write a paper for the Caribbean. It wrote one for Italy. The coefficient it produced, however, sits inside a wider truth: every percentage point of cash that moves to digital is a measurable input to growth, and developing economies sit further from saturation than Italy does. Guyana and Jamaica have rails being built or already built. The infrastructure question is closer to closed than it has ever been. The growth dividend is now a function of throughput, fraud control, and consumer trust. None of those are solved by a paper. They are solved by execution at the central-bank-and-merchant interface.

Key facts at a glance

About the Author

Theon Alleyne, CRCP, CCEP, is the Founder of EICCIO Advisors, a compliance advisory firm based in Georgetown, Guyana, providing compliance strategy and financial crime risk advisory services to financial institutions across the Caribbean. A former securities regulator with experience at NYSE American, NASDAQ and FINRA, he specialises in anti-financial crime compliance, fraud prevention and sales practice conduct risk. Alleyne is a member of the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators (IAFCI). His book, Letters to a Compliance Officer: What They Never Told You About the Job That Protects Everyone, published by Team Shaw Caribbean Press, is available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and 10 additional platforms worldwide.