A Finextra article argues that Africa’s successful fintechs need to move on to tackle interoperability if they are to thrive.

At the end of June, the Bank of England launched a consultation about the future of the UK’s retail payment infrastructure. The consultation focuses on the core clearing and messaging infrastructure needed to support the National Payments Vision for the future of retail payments.

The Canadian government is planning to ban Canada’s estimated 4,000 crypto capable ATMs after concluding that they are being used by scammers to defraud users.

Atlantic Council has published an article looking at the growth of using local currencies for cross-border payments rather than the US dollar. The article concludes that this change has been driven by a wish to reduce costs, limit exposure to foreign-exchange volatility, and lessen vulnerabilities stemming from reliance on a handful of major currencies for cross-border payment transactions.

A consortium of major European banks are working on a privately-issued digital euro. However, the European Central Bank (ECB) argues that euro-denominated stablecoins are not an effective way to strengthen the euro’s international appeal.

Diederik Bruggink, Senior Director – Payments, Digital Finance and Innovation (WSBI-ESBG), has published an article in the Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems: ‘A Tale of Transactions: An analysis of Retail Payments in the Euro Area’ posted on LinkedIn about it (Post | LinkedIn). The paper takes a data-driven look at how Europeans really pay today – across cash, debit cards and e-money – using the European Central Bank (ECB) SPACE 2024 study and the ECB Data Portal, with the aim of adding to the current debate about a possible holding limit for the digital euro.

Chris Skinner’s new book, The Intelligent Bank, is not about cash1. He writes about how banking, having become digital, is now on a journey to become intelligent. He argues that this requires a fundamentally new way of working because it requires smart data. There are, perhaps, two key lessons which apply to cash and the cash cycle.

The CPT Group has published a comparative analysis of recent consumer payments surveys from Switzerland, Australia, and Jamaica, drawing some striking parallels despite the three countries' very different payment landscapes.

Reuters reports the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is considering new controls for high-value transactions due to a rise in digital frauds.

The European Payment Initiative and the Digital Euro aim to gain European payment independence from the US payment giants.