Cash & Payment News in February

The theme of February’s Cash and Payment News (CPN) is very much on the future of cash and payments, considering as it does two sides of a coin, namely evidence of cash under pressure and the robust activity underway to keep it available, useful and preferred.

We review papers considering institutional hostility to cash, the impact of the pandemic on payments in the Netherlands and the extent that foreign demand for euro cash explains the ‘cash paradox’. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority reports on cash in Hong Kong and its priorities for 2021 and we look at the latest US Consumer Payment Diary.

With the publication of the CashEssentials CashTech paper on innovation and technology in cash delivery, we focus on this report and the practical solutions now being implemented to create a sustainable, future-proof cash cycle.

In addition, we report on the situation in the UK, where cash pressure is evident but there is a major campaign underway in response to support cash.

We interview Graeme Donald, who is leading a new global initiative called Universal Access to Payments (UA2P), about his vision for this and how it will work.

We also provide an overview of the Future of Cash conference, which provided an excellent overview of the challenges and opportunities.

In other news, we report on Mastercard’s recent fee hike, card fraud in the US, and the European Court of Justice ruling on the Hessischer Rundfunk case about cash as legal tender in the EU.

Finally, we focus on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) – reporting on the latest BIS survey of who is doing what, the IMF’s report on where central banks stand legally if they want to issue one, and a challenging article that questions what problem central banks are trying to answer and whether CBDCs are a good idea.