The Dutch National Bank (DNB) has published its Payment Strategy 2022-2025. The strategy has three priorities; ensuring access to payments, maintaining a robust and reliable payment structure, and strengthening European and global payments, leveraging the Dutch experience.

In early June Currency Research will host its first in person Cash Cycle Seminar since COVID forced a postponement of the planned March 2020 event in Amsterdam. Taking place in Istanbul, the conference combines the previously separated Europe and MEA ICCOS events, with a focused agenda examining developments in the cash distribution and circulation sector.

Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK have enacted legislation requiring that their countries have net zero carbon emissions by 2050 in line with the Paris Agreement. Net zero is achieved when the amount of carbon dioxide we add to the environment is no more than the amount taken away.

The Bank of Canada runs two ‘Cash Alternative Surveys’ in April and August each year of a representative sample of 2,500–3,500 Canadians. It combines this with data from its Bank Note Distribution System to monitor the use of cash.

In preparation for a meeting of emerging market economy Deputy Governors organised by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the BIS surveyed 26 central banks and received papers relating to their CBDC work from 24 of them.

At the Banknote & Currency Conference last month, Swiss substrate manufacturer Landqart revealed useful new research it has been carrying out on how to dispose of banknotes at the end of their life in an environmentally sound way.

The Digital Currency Conference (DCC) took place in person immediately after the Banknote & Currency Conference in February. The agenda raced through a wide range of topics, including quantum computing, achieving privacy with CBDCs, the Digital Dollar Project, and digital currencies.

The Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) is working on a possible future Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and is looking to have its Real Digital ready for 2024.

In many countries the COVID-19 pandemic has seen cash in circulation reach record levels, yet, with diminished economic activity and a push towards ‘contactless’ payments, transactional cash use has continued to decline.

In 2020 consumers made 15.5 billion debit card payments in the UK. Mastercard has just said that over half of the world’s in person payments are now made using contactless technology.

Money has a public and a private role touch on financial obligations, authority and credit. But what happens when bank accounts, credit and debit cards and even cash are disrupted by war?

The Deputy Governor of the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) has said it is on track to launch its CBDC in the first quarter of 2022, having completed the pilot in December 2021. At the moment, it is working to increase the number of commercial banks capable and ready to open accounts for CBDC users.

In Denmark cash may only be used in 12% of transactions, but one in four person-to-person transactions are made in cash and one in three Danes hold cash at home as a reserve. How much people hold has also increased.

A new IMF paper concludes that the main influence on the demand for cash, and why demand is falling, seems to lie in the demand preferences of changing population structures. If CBDCs are issued, the demand for cash may continue to fall, but the demand for card usage may fall by even more.

A recent post highlighted how misleading the constant stream of headlines about a cashless society is. Going cashless makes for wonderfully shocking, attention-grabbing headlines.

In 2020 Apple bought Mobeewave, a start-up working to enable contactless payments using smart phones. Bloomberg has reported that Apple will allow small businesses to use iPhones to accept payments ‘in the coming months’.

China has been working hard to get its e-CNY ready in the run up to the Beijing winter Olympics with the aim of using the games to test its CBDC. The e-CNY could be used by visitors to China as well as the local population.

The agenda of the Optical and Digital Document Security (ODDS) conference reflects increasing interest in getting cash to interact with smartphones and other devices. Four papers consider new approaches in this area.

Finance.ua, a Ukrainian financial media organisation, posted cash usage rates for Europe in 2019 based on Statista data and then compared it with a smaller selection of countries in 2020 and then 2021.

In countries where less cash is already underway, there is an underlying assumption that it is only a matter of time before cash will reach a tipping point that makes digital payments a requirement. The unstated assumption is that cash will end, and that digital is the future. There is an urgency, therefore, to make digital payments work.