This year Microsoft turns 50. Amazon is just over 30, Meta is 21 and the iPhone is just 18. Another organisation turning 18 this year, one that has had a major impact on payments, is M-Pesa. Payments:Unpacked recently ran an article from Jeremy Light’s Agenda:Payments newsletter2 celebrating M-Pesa’s milestone birthday.

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.

On 5 February 2025, the Deutsche Bundesbank held its sixth cash symposium in Berlin. Around 120 participants from politics, industry and society attended.

The use of coin dates back over 2,500 years, and in an industry that old, it can be difficult to do anything genuinely ‘new’. Hence the excitement when NatWest hosted what’s believed to be the first ever cash hackathon at their London HQ in late November, with attendees from a range of industries, to innovate on future payment methods, and reimagine the future of cash.

While the United States and Brazil debate the use of bitcoin in their international reserves, the Banco Central de Chile, in line with its Governor's firm commitment to cash, categorically rules out this possibility, arguing that crypto assets do not meet the legal or technical criteria for their inclusion.

At the recent CBDC Conference in Istanbul a number of key themes emerged. That the given focus of this event, as its name indicates, is predominantly on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), these themes were in sharper contrast to the subsequent Digital Currency Conference in London, which had a broader remit.

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 Canada has issued a staff discussion paper considering the role of retail public money at a time when new technology and new participants, some non-financial firms, are entering the process of money creation.

At the recent Cash Sustainability Forum, held in Frankfurt last month, Ian Woolford, Head of Money and Cash at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, gave a presentation on the country’s impending community cash services trial.

It appears that payment stakeholders in the US and UK are seeking to pass laws and take legal action to address a perceived lack of competition in the digital payment arena. In the last few weeks, there have been a series of reports detailing legislative, regulatory and court developments in this area.