A survey by UK ATM network LINK found that people under 45 in the UK tend to prefer a digital wallet, while people who are older use physical debit cards. Fewer than half of UK adults carry a physical wallet. Despite that, in 2024 about £1,250 in cash per adult was withdrawn from ATMs and 51% of people said they had used cash in the previous week.

The ‘Cash Paradox’ is the well known conundrum of cash transaction volumes falling while cash in circulation volumes increase. This gap can only be explained by cash hoarding. Much of this will be by commercial banks, hence the surge in cash returned to the European Central Bank once its interest rate turned from negative to positive.

Despite predictions of a cashless society, cash remains vital across all age groups. New ECB research reveals older adults prefer cash for transactions, but young adults pay with cash at roughly the average rate and keep cash reserves. The perceived importance of cash is rising for all!

May’s edition of Cash & Payment News™ reported on a recent Bank of Canada staff paper updating a previous study on access to cash in Canada. Hot on its heels is a new paper that moves the topic forward.

A Centre for Economic Policy Research paper has focused on the need for central banks to be financially resilient.

In early January of this year, an article in Chile’s primary newspaper almost proudly touted the fact that Chile’s CLP had reached a new status in Argentina (the CLP is the name of the exchange rate used by anyone in Chile who needs to buy US dollars unofficially). Suddenly, the Chilean peso had achieved sufficient stature to be exchanged informally at multiples of ARS 1.03 to 1.21 for each CLP 1.

This is the title of a recently published study that is the third and final module in a series of studies in Germany looking at the ‘Costs and Benefits of Cash and Cashless Payment Instruments’.

Stefan Hardt, Chief Cashier of the Bundesbank, posed this question at the recent Intergraf Currency+Identity conference in Milan. Ironically, this comes just as the Bank of England appoints Victoria Cleland to have a combined role of being Executive Director for Payments and Chief Cashier. Sarah John, the current Chief Cashier, is moving to be the Bank’s Chief Operating Officer.

An article in the BBN Times has explored the future of digital payments, particularly where users convert digital transactions into real cash, which they refer to as small payment cashing, and what users can expect in the coming years.

Every country has the ‘unbanked’, those without access to the financial system. A paper at the end of last year from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia explored the situation in the US by looking at the biennial Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked between 2015 and 2019. The paper aimed to understand those who are unbanked and how these relationships evolved.