An excellent session at the Global Currency Forum saw Joash Rono (Central Bank of Kenya), Alberto Torfer (Bank of Mexico), Anwar Bashori (Bank Indonesia – BI), Firat Emre Karakas (Central Bank of Türkiye – CBRT) and Faisal I Algosar (Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority) give the perspective of some high volume economies, a very different set of priorities from other presentations.

There is a very significant focus on the challenges faced when people choose to pay digitally rather than with cash. It seems to be a, if not the, core theme of conferences, publications and public policy wherever you go. Why? And should it be? Two papers reported in this edition suggest it should not – the high volume economies report from the Global Currency Forum (GCF) and the Currency Research Cash Resilience paper.

A snapshot of recent annual reports (relating to 2024) and their payment contents.

As we are aware, the use of cash is most certainly not being promoted with the same vigour that the use of electronic or mobile payments has been in recent media and advertising.

The Bank of England’s 2023/24 report outlines significant activities related to banknotes, payments and digital currency. Banknote value and volume in circulation was flat but net seigniorage income was up 153%. The Bank continues to make progress on its net zero carbon goals.

The ‘Privacy Paradox’ is where people claim more concern with privacy than their actual behaviour indicates. This ‘say-do gap’ exists in many areas, including the need for cash to be maintained, but despite that, it means organisations are forced to respond.

The Bank of England (BoE) has published its approach to innovation in money and payments, proposing a programme to test infrastructure that supports the settlement of central bank money against digital assets such as stablecoins, tokenised deposits and other innovations. The Bank has published previous papers on the regulation of stablecoins, innovations by deposit-takers and CBDCs.

Tobias Adrian, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Financial Counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, spoke at the International Symposium on Central Bank Independence in Stockholm at the start of the year. His topic was maintaining central bank independence alongside the development of payments and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).

In this new periodic series, we will cover in brief the news and information in various countries’ central bank annual reports as they relate to cash and payments, starting off with Ireland, Rwanda and Bhutan.

The ability of private citizens to execute electronic transactions using a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), central bank money, introduces new monetary stability challenges. A paper by Harald Uhlig from the University of Chicago considers this. The paper is highly theoretical but raises the sort of questions central banks have to get right in their planning for a CBDC.