US Cash Supply Chain Gets Ready for Cash Visibility

Cash Visibility – the Federal Reserve’s program to automate the cash supply chain – is at the point of rolling out.

Cash Visibility (CV) is a multi-year, multi-phase joint industry initiative aimed at bringing greater transparency and efficiency to cash supply chain logistics by developing a framework that will identify, track, and share data about cash packages as they move between cash supply chain organisations.

The framework will replace the somewhat opaque current system, which continues to rely on paper and physical signatures to document cash package transfers between the supply chain participants.

Using supply chain logistics standards and concepts, the Federal Reserve Banks, the Cash Product Office (CPO), Cash Advisory Group (CAG), Cash Advisory Council (CAC), and GS1 US have developed CV data standards that will incorporate the use of scanning technologies with cash shipments to enable significant improvements in cash handling.

These improvements will reduce manual data entry by replacing paper-based manifests with electronic manifests (the E-Manifest Service), allowing Federal Reserve Banks to electronically process deposits and payments with industry partners using those industry-supported data standards.

The program was launched in 2017, a US GS1 prefix was licenced and development work began. A proof of concept was launched in 2018 to test the use of the e-Manifest and run field tests within the industry. In 2020 the roll-out of the FedCash E-Manifest Service Readiness Program began. The Paying functionality was added in 2021 and work was ramped up within the industry to assess readiness and support adoption.

Financial institutions and armoured carriers are now being invited to get ready for the service by identifying their supply partners and applying for their GS1 prefix.

According to the Fed, the benefits of the Cash Visibility program are fivefold – (1) improved resilience, (2) accelerated dock exchanges, (3) more efficient reconciliation, processing and loss prevention, (4) sustainability through reduced dependency on paper deposit tickets and manifests, and (5) future automation opportunities, such as settlement and reconciliation automation and leveraging data for enhanced operational efficiencies.