David Fagleman, of the consultancy Enryo, has recently presented and written about cash in circulation (CIC). He makes the case that CIC data provided by central banks is unhelpful because it overstates the case for cash usage and creates confusion about what is actually happening.

CashEssentials – the cash and payments think tank – has launched the CashTech Forum to promote innovation and technology, thereby ensuring a sustainable and future-proof cash ecosystem.

The Banca d’Italia (BdI) issued a technical paper in July analysing 20 years of cash data to understand cash circulation, important to a central bank for planning cash production and its monetary policy implementation framework.

Enryo, the payment consultancy, addressed the ‘cash paradox’ in a recent piece in Finextra.

A recent article by the Dutch National Bank (DNB) explained that, as a consequence of the pandemic, its intake of banknotes has fallen to the extent that it is now issuing more euro banknotes than it is getting back in, a first since it started issuing them. The number of notes issued fell by 10% in 2020 but the number of notes received fell by more, by 25%.

The European Central Bank (ECB) study, 'Foreign Demand for Euro Banknotes', set out to identify the demand drivers for euro banknotes and to estimate the share of euro banknotes in circulation outside of the euro area.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) monitors payments closely. During 2020 there were some interesting variations that HKMA will track in 2021. The priority for 2021 will be to monitor and understand what is happening across a range of indicators so that HKMA can manage the appropriate supply of banknotes.

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.

In its latest Quarterly Bulletin, the Bank of England published an article ‘Cash in the time of COVID’. The article seeks to explain what it referred to as the cash ‘paradox’, that cash in circulation is up while cash transaction volumes are down, which has been brought into sharp relief during the pandemic.