With 163 banknote issuing authorities, over 1,000 circulating banknote denominations and a similar number of coins, exploring currency trends can look daunting. Central banks, mints and treasury departments often need to understand design, substrate and security feature trends in the region and wider to explore options. Printers, designers, R&D departments and product managers, suppliers and cash cycle stakeholders also need this information.

18 months after the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) exited the mBridge cross-border project and launched Project Agorá, the fragmentation of cross-border payments has become almost institutionalised.

A consortium of major European banks are working on a privately-issued digital euro. However, the European Central Bank (ECB) argues that euro-denominated stablecoins are not an effective way to strengthen the euro’s international appeal.

In a speech at the Banknote Conference on payment choice by Victoria Cleland, the Bank of England’s Executive Director, Payments, cash took centre stage.

Atlantic Council has published an article looking at the growth of using local currencies for cross-border payments rather than the US dollar. The article concludes that this change has been driven by a wish to reduce costs, limit exposure to foreign-exchange volatility, and lessen vulnerabilities stemming from reliance on a handful of major currencies for cross-border payment transactions.

Chris Skinner’s new book, The Intelligent Bank, is not about cash1. He writes about how banking, having become digital, is now on a journey to become intelligent. He argues that this requires a fundamentally new way of working because it requires smart data. There are, perhaps, two key lessons which apply to cash and the cash cycle.

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.

Diederik Bruggink, Senior Director – Payments, Digital Finance and Innovation (WSBI-ESBG), has published an article in the Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems: ‘A Tale of Transactions: An analysis of Retail Payments in the Euro Area’ posted on LinkedIn about it (Post | LinkedIn). The paper takes a data-driven look at how Europeans really pay today – across cash, debit cards and e-money – using the European Central Bank (ECB) SPACE 2024 study and the ECB Data Portal, with the aim of adding to the current debate about a possible holding limit for the digital euro.

At the Global Currency Forum (GCF) in Antalya at the end of April, who said or made a comment along the lines below (answers below)?

In conjunction with the UK’s National Westminster bank, Prof Darren Duxbury, behavioural finance expert and Chair in Finance at Newcastle University Business School, has carried out a research project investigating the behavioural traits that influence peoples’ choices of payment method.

Currency Research has published a report on the findings of a survey of 37 central banks across six continents to examine global cash usage trends and the longterm role of physical currency. The report was initiated because the experiences of mature economies are shaping the cash narrative when, in fact, the rest of the world is seeing a very different situation.

The CPT Group has published a comparative analysis of recent consumer payments surveys from Switzerland, Australia, and Jamaica, drawing some striking parallels despite the three countries' very different payment landscapes.

Hot on the heels of the Global Currency Forum come three more conferences.

This article was first published in February’s edition of Coin & Mint News™. The issue of estimated coin life has been a subject of speculation for a long time. There are limited data and systematic studies about the life of coins. Publicly available information from world mints suggests that coins could remain in circulation for at least 25 or 30 years. There are other sources suggesting that coins could last in circulation much longer and their lifetime could even exceed 50 years.

As geopolitical storms reshape global finance, cash is evolving into a strategic tool for sovereignty, resilience, and trust in an era of fragmentation and digital vulnerability.

OMFIF, an independent think tank for central banking, economic policy and public investment, has argued that cash plays a systemic role that no digital payment instrument, no matter how sophisticated, can replicate.

Reuters reports the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is considering new controls for high-value transactions due to a rise in digital frauds.

Franklin Noll of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has looked at where stablecoins are held and how they are used in the financial ecosystem in a Payments System Research Briefing.

Norges Bank has now published four reports that led it to conclude in December 2025 that introducing a CBDC was currently not warranted.