May’s edition of Cash & Payment News

Payment news: This month we highlight a number of challenging areas for digital payments, rising card fees in the US and Germany, research that suggests people select banks based on branch proximity and that the pain of paying leads people to spend more and make unwise choices.

Cash news: Cash news is more positive, with the Community Access to Cash Pilots making real progress in the UK, cash volumes returning, and the latest US Payment Diary showing cash usage falling in line with the closure of places where low value transactions take place but cash held increasing across all age groups and incomes. In addition to general news, some of this is covered in two reports that focus on what is happening in the UK and US to cash and to payments.

Coins: We focus on coins covering the recent Mint Director Conference webinar where the Federal Reserve’s CPO office, Coinstar and David Hensley all talked about where coins are heading at the moment.

Cash management: We write about cash management based on a presentation by the Turkish CIT Bantas, where they argue that despite all the technology and science, ‘art’ is still needed to manage cash well.

CBDCs: We review a CEPR paper that lays out the real challenges of designing CBDCs successfully to achieve the often discussed benefits of resilience, inclusion and competition. Our usual CBDC News section covers consultations by the Banks of Thailand and Israel into their CBDC work, G+D’s latest CBDC statement and an update on China’s DCEP pilot.

Technology glossary: For the fun of it we give a short explanation of programmable money, tokenisation and non-fungible tokens. All terms much mentioned but perhaps not fully understood.