Cash Essentials, the independent initiative that seeks to provide a platform for debate about the payments and monetary ecosystems, has published its first edition of a Cash Glossary. The aim is to give the cash industry a shared vocabulary relating to payments and the cash cycle.

Reconnaissance International (RI), co-publisher of Cash and Payment News™ (CPN), is pleased to announce that it is moving to a new online platform incorporating a weekly newsfeed service alongside the monthly newsletter.

In December RBR ran an online conference for Self-Service Banking Europe. There is much in the news about attacks on ATMs and this was one of the areas of interest in the conference. Paul Nicholls from Oberthur Cash Protection, Spencer Marshall from HID Global and Duane Campbell from Tesco discussed what they are doing in this area.

Thus said Ralph Wintergerst, CEO of Giesecke + Devrient (G+D), to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper before Christmas. G+D has invested significantly in this area to position itself for the future and to support its worldwide relationships with central banks. It is confident that cash will remain a core payment instrument but sees a future shift to Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

​UK Finance, who represent the banking industry, are reported by The Times newspaper to have asked the Treasury to increase the contactless payment limit from £45 to £100. Prior to the COVID pandemic the limit had been £30. The Financial Conduct Authority would have to approve any change.

On 1 January 2021, a new law came into effect in Sweden intended to secure access to cash and payment services.

Cardtronics runs 285,000 ATMs in 10 countries, making it the world’s largest operator of non-bank cash machines. This Houston based company is a major player in the cash industry but is now being pursued by two companies, firstly Apollo Global Management and Hudson Executive Capital and secondly NCR.

In April 2020 Harro Boven and Peter Wieters published a Dutch National Bank (DNB) Occasional Study on the objectives, pre-conditions and design choices for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Harro wrote an abridged version that was used in Payers’ December publication about CBDCs which is summarised here.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is keen that EU member states engage with the public policy debate around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) for the eurozone. In this context, it is reported that the Italian Banking Association is starting a technical feasibility study into using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for a future ‘digital euro’.

Doris Schneeberger, Head of the Currency Management Division at the European Central Bank (ECB), spoke at December’s RBR conference giving the Eurosystem perspective on trends and developments in the use of cash.

Bantas is a Turkish based cash in transit (CIT) joint venture between three Turkish commercial banks. With about 1,600 staff, it looks after 48 cash centres, servicing 9,000 ATMs, 2,700 bank branches and 3,300 shops using 425 armoured trucks.

In the UK a company called BitcoinPoint has acted to make owning and using bitcoins easier. They are collaborating with the independent ATM operator Cashzone, who run 16,000 ATMs across the UK.

At the ICCOS Americas online conference there was, unusually, a coin panel, ‘Coin, coin everywhere and not a cent to spend.’ The focus was on what had happened to coins in the US in the pandemic, why a Coin Task Force had had to be set up and what the situation is now. The panel consisted of Kathleen Young from the Federal Reserve Cash Services Product Office, Ashley Yayock from Walmart, Thomas Strauser from Loomis, JR Davis from Davis Bankcorp and Linda Sherry from National Priorities Consumer Council.

Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, made a speech about the move to digital payments. Despite all the innovation of credit cards, ATMs, faster payments, open banking etc., he quoted Thomas Philippon, Professor of Finance at the New York University Stern School of Business, who estimates that the unit cost of financial services has hardly changed over the last century.

Allied Universal has offered 245 pence in cash for each G4S plc share and agreement on the terms of the offer have been reached. This values the company at £3.8 billion, representing a premium of about 68% to the closing price of G4S shares on 11 September 2020, and an 11% premium to the highest closing price in the previous year. GardaWorld had offered 235 pence per share, some 4% less. G4S Directors intend unanimously to recommend that their shareholders accept the offer.

Commercial banks are at the heart of the cash cycle and their branches have been their key customer touchpoint. If you read the news section on bank branches, you might think they are to become a side show for commercial banks. RBR held an online conference on branch transformation at the end of November. The move by customers online, using apps and telephone banking is accelerating a trend to slim down branch networks, and so this event was a useful insight into the future branch.

YouGov have carried out a survey in 21 countries asking about payments in the pandemic, which provides an interesting snapshot on the relative impact of COVID-19 on cash usage around the world.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published the results of a major study into the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area (SPACE) and compared it with a similar 2016 study (the SUCH study on the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area). It also published results of another large scale interim 2020 survey, the impact of the pandemic on cash trends (IMPACT) survey.

Did much happen this year? A moment to reflect.

The Bundesbank (BBk) provides 25.5% of the fully paid capital that underpins the European Central Bank (ECB), but it has brought into circulation 29.9% of the value of coins in circulation (€8.46 billion). This figure has been stable for some time.