Australia’s Commonwealth Bank is to scrap over-the-counter cash withdrawals at new cashless bank branches. Cash will still be available at ATMs.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has surveyed 86 central banks and found over half are conducting concrete experiments or piloting CBDCs.

Planning for the third euro series is underway. The Theme Advisory Group has issued a shortlist of six themes following an internal voting procedure.

At the Currency Conference in May 54 members of the International Association of Currency Affairs (IACA) met to discuss how to build a resilient cash infrastructure, a highly topical subject.

China’s digital currency, the e-CNY, is the world’s largest, longest running and most ambitious Central Bank Digital Currency pilot. Its scale and ambition are huge, as shown by the Governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) who, speaking at a Monetary Authority of Singapore conference, revealed that the e-CNY has had over $250 billion in transactions in its first 18 months since launch.

The European Money and Finance Forum has recently published a useful paper on big data and machine learning in central banks.

The media rejoices in either claiming the metaverse is dead in the water or that it is booming. Wherever it falls, payments are made in the metaverse, it is a global marketplace and there is the opportunity to do things differently.

In 2019 the Central Bank of Kenya demonetised the KES 1,000 banknote. It has issued a comprehensive report on its experience that offers interesting lessons for any central bank planning such an exercise.

The Bank for International Settlements has published ‘A Handbook for Offline Payments with Central Bank Digital Currencies’.

Many countries are facing falling cash demand, which is causing problems in the cash cycle. This report, by Paul Blond of the Blond Group LLP, shows the compromises having to be made in Australia as a result.

Bruegel, a Brussels based European think tank, has published a paper considering the value added by CBDC in the context of the euro area.

Following industry wide consultation at the end of 2022, the Australian Federal Government has published its Strategic Plan for the future of Australia’s payments system setting out a number of policy objectives and priorities. The plan outlines the government’s commitment to ensuring that the country’s payments system is safe, affordable, trusted and will remain readily accessible.

Account-to-account payments (A2A) have been talked about for some time. There is some evidence that they are beginning to fulfil their promise. The latest 2023 Worldpay Global Payments Report from FIS says there are now 64 real-time payment schemes in operation providing high-speed payment rails for A2A payments.

The Future of Cash conference takes place in Istanbul 6-8 November, with the early booking delegate fee ending on 15 September.

With the publication of the IMF paper ‘Measurement and Use of Cash by Half the World’s Population’, and the Cash Essentials rebuttal, a new paper about demand forecasting by the Banca d’Italia is timely and adds to the discussion.

The Federalist Society in the US has published a useful, and brief, summary of where key economies are in their CBDC thinking.

Visa carried out a Consumer Payment Attitudes study in Singapore in October 2022. It found that nearly 90% of Singaporean consumers regard cashless payments and mobile banking to be the most eco-friendly option.

The Dutch Finance Minister has proposed legislation to ensure the provision of cash facilities, at least to a basic level. The legislation builds on the results of a PwC study on the future structure of the system for banknote and coin deposits and withdrawals for consumers and retailers.

In the last few years, the number of papers written about CDDCs has exploded as the world’s central banks rush to think about and investigate them. The Bank of Canada has carried out a literature review focusing in particular on the potential impact of introducing a CBDC on private banks, which it has published as a staff discussion paper.

The latest Federal Reserve Payments Study shows an annual 6.2% increase in the number of card payments between 2018 and 2021. Behind that figure there are fluctuations, a fall in 2020 being offset by a rise in 2021, for example.