Cash & Payment News August Issue

Cash & Payment News™ didn’t go on holiday in August. Instead, it has focused on the environment, the importance of inclusion, a paper by ESTA on access to cash, a country profile of cash in Rwanda, a study of cash in Italy and the review of a BIS paper on CBDC privacy. All this alongside news summaries relating to cash, payments and CBDCs.

As noted, in the Currency News comment, the environment is always important and stakeholders in the cash cycle have done tremendous work in this area. On 1 November the latest UN Climate Change meeting, COP 26, starts in Glasgow in the UK. There will be significant press interest and focus on the environment and, recognising that, we are working with the industry to pull together a paper recording what has been achieved and putting the environmental impact of payments in context.

Financial inclusion is a much talked about topic. Proponents of more digital payments claim they offer a more inclusive future, while cash is offered up as the ultimate guarantor of inclusion.

This month we continue a series of pieces we have been writing about inclusion with coverage of the FRB of Atlanta’s study of the unbanked, a review of an academic paper by Peterson K Ozili about financial inclusion and why it is harder than it looks, a look at how organisations are trying to introduce children to digital payments and a comment on how an article by the Economist Intelligence Unit uses language to make the case for digital payments. Financial inclusion is not simply a matter of digital good, digital better, digital best.