Bank accounts have been pretty mainstream for 40 years! I can just about understand people in their 90s not having a bank account as they'd be in their 50s in the 1980s. But anyone younger must have been living under a rock. Credit/debit cards were pretty commonplace in the 80s. I started work in 1983 and was never paid cash - bank accounts were the norm back then. I had an an active bank account in my teenage years in the 70s!
Telephone banking came in during the early 1990s. Internet banking has been with us for over 20 years!
My point is that bank accounts are nothing new, nor are credit cards, nor is internet banking etc. My mother had a credit card from around the late 70s and she was born in 1924, so she'd have got it when she was in her mid to late 50s and was using internet banking, multiple cards, multiple accounts when she died in her 90s!
I just find is very strange that there are people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s who don't have bank accounts, don't have cards, etc. They were in the prime of their working/active lives in the 80s and 90s when there was a seismic shift from cash to bank (wages, benefits, direct debits, etc.).
I'm sure some people don't move with the times just because they're awkward. Like the client I have who proudly claims she "doesn't do internet" and insists on us writing letters to her instead of pinging an email or text meaning more work and cost for us - she's only in her 50s - I put a stop to that when I noticed her posting on a local Facebook group. Funny how when challenged, she suddenly decided that she did have email and a smart phone after all!!
Yes, I appreciate some will have disabilities etc to make it harder. My MIL "liked" to use cash for shopping, etc., but everything else was paid directly into her bank accounts and paid out by standing order, direct debits, etc. She only used cash out of habit. She's got dementia and getting worse, and the amount of cash she was losing was ridiculous - she'd draw out a couple of hundred on a Monday and have an empty purse by Wednesday despite not going anywhere - she was either hiding it and forgetting where it was, or losing it etc. Though when we went shopping with her, we did notice she didn't seem to understand the "value" of it, and would try to use, say, a ten pound note to buy a newspaper for 70p, so I suspect she may have been getting ripped off by shop assistants! She couldn't work out that a coin was worth less than a flimsy piece of paper!! We transitioned her over to using a simple debit card (low balance) over a few months (yes it took a long time due to her dementia), but now she's forgotten what cash is and just gets her card out whatever she buys. It's much better as she's nothing to lose anymore and the bank statement shows a record of what she's bought and how much she's spent, so easier for us to keep track of her spending. OH has the app downloaded so we get "pinged" whenever she uses it, which has been helpful as she sometimes takes it on herself to go out on her own and inevitably occasionally gets lost, so when we get a ping from somewhere strange, we know where she is and can go and get her if it's somewhere outlandish out of her immediate area! I think card can be better than cash in some scenarios to prevent theft/loss for dementia sufferers and elderly who struggle.