Requiem for missing papers. Where have our photos, our pay slips, our metro tickets, our receipts, our bank notes and now our meal vouchers gone? The digital steamroller is consigning these physical vestiges of our everyday lives to oblivion.
The Minister for Trade, Olivia Grégoire, announced Monday October 2 that meal vouchers, which weigh down the wallets of some five million employees in France, will all be dematerialized before 2026. And as always, it is both a good news and bad news.
The ground had been prepared for several years. In 2019, the Competition Authority imposed a fine of 415 million euros on the four main issuers in the sector, Natixis Intertitres, Edenred, UP and Sodexo. They were accused of having exchanged commercial information, through a common association, the Title Settlement Center (CRT), which acted as intermediary between the restaurateurs and them.
Threat of commission capping
The Authority also criticized them for having agreed to lock down the market, in particular by prohibiting themselves from engaging in the dematerialization of securities. As a result of this conviction, since March, the CRT has no longer collected tickets, requiring restaurateurs to sort and send the paper tickets themselves by La Poste. Nothing better to discourage restaurateurs. Some now refuse them.
This is why catering professionals welcome the ministerial announcement, which will make their lives easier, introduce more competition into the sector and, they hope, reduce the price of issuers’ commissions, a logical benefit of the end of paper. The minister is also threatening to cap them. Immediate howl from said issuers, who anticipate a collapse in their margins. The Edenred group, a member of the CAC 40, plunged more than 10% on the stock market on Monday.
The news is positive for users, but also carries with it the usual curses that accompany the advent of the digital society: invasion of privacy, social exclusion, tracking of expenses… The paradox of a society of ever more individuals free, but who will never have been so closely monitored.