DKK 3.5 million for a project on payment options in times of crisis
A grant from the Inge Lehmann Programme will support a project investigating vulnerabilities in Danes’ payment options in the event of a crisis.
Written 13 April, 2026 13:29 by Niels Thrane
Many Danes expect that they can pay with cash—even during a crisis such as a cyberattack or power outage—but is that actually the case? And is society prepared if digital payment systems break down? These are the questions that Assistant Professor Sunniva Sandbukt at the IT University of Copenhagen will examine in the project “Cash Contingencies: Transactional Vulnerability in the Era of Digital Payments.”
Over the past ten years, digitalisation has radically transformed Denmark’s payment landscape. Cash has gradually been replaced by digital solutions.
“Eighty-nine percent of all transactions made at a cash register today are digital. In the past few years, a third of those transactions have moved to apps, especially Apple Pay and Google Pay. This challenges the Danish Dankort payment system, because app payments typically default to international providers such as Visa and Mastercard, which then collect the transaction fees. This means that the Dankort system may become more expensive to operate over time and perhaps cannot be maintained. That was part of what sparked my interest—what happens when a collective payment solution we take for granted stops being used and might eventually stop working?” says Assistant Professor Sunniva Sandbukt from the IT University, who has been awarded DKK 3.5 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark for the project.
Is the current emergency preparedness system sufficient in a crisis?
In 2024, the Danish Resilience Agency published a brochure titled “Get Through Crises Safely,” which provides advice on how much water, food, and other essentials each household should store in case of a crisis. The brochure recommends that “each household should have physical payment cards and possibly cash in coins and small banknotes.”
“The problem is that if our entire payment infrastructure is no longer designed to handle cash payments, then what? There are fewer and fewer ATMs—and would they even function during a crisis? And do we have systems that can handle that many cash payments now that we are used to simply using our phones?” says Sunniva Sandbukt.
According to Sandbukt, the goal of the project is not to propose a specific solution to the challenge, but rather to investigate how digitalisation—and the privatisation of our shared payment infrastructure—has created new societal vulnerabilities.
“We will examine how different actors, such as the National Bank of Denmark and the Payments Council—which brings together the most important players in the payments sector—view the vulnerabilities in our payment systems. In doing so, we hope to better understand how digitalisation has affected our ability to carry out payments in a crisis situation.”
ITU’s role
“Cash Contingencies: Transactional Vulnerability in the Era of Digital Payments” will begin in September 2026, run for three and a half years, and be conducted in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute and the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine.
The project will be based in the Technologies in Practice section at the IT University of Copenhagen, where Assistant Professor Sunniva Sandbukt is affiliated. The section’s holistic approach to technology will provide the framework for the research. “The Technologies in Practice section is particularly well suited to contribute ethnographic research, focusing on the underlying infrastructural components that shape transactional politics in Denmark,” says Assistant Professor Sunniva Sandbukt.
Jari Kickbusch, phone 7218 5304, email jark@itu.dk