Allied Universal is a security and facility services company. It has just published its 2021 Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) report, its first ever. This lays out its strategy, targets and progress across all ESG areas.

In Australia, Armaguard Group has reached agreement to merge Prosegur Australia into their business. The merger will include cash in transit, technical services and ATM networks within Australia.

The Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey has used its October 2020 Methods of Payment Survey (MPS) to explore the role of financial literacy as a driver of cash usage.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published an article discussing access to cash in the euro area. It examines the challenges of distance, capacity and public perception and different approaches to modelling them.

CashTech gathers companies which leverage software and communications technology to provide improved cash services as well as to enhance the efficiency of the cash cycle.

The World Bank’s Financial Inclusion Global Initiative (FIGI) has issued a paper investigating Incentives for Electronic Payment Acceptance (EPA). The report was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Diebold Nixdorf recently presented a webinar on the benefits and logic of cash automation and how to do cash recycling well.

The Economist magazine issued a special report on Environment, Society and Governance (ESG) in its 23 July 2022 edition. It describes ESG as having had a ‘negligible impact on carbon emissions’.

Taiwan has said that it has completed trials of its prototype retail CBDC in technical simulations. This was concluded three months early. Electronic payments have risen from 40% in 2017 to 60% in the first quarter of 2022.

Professors Gerhard Rösl and Franz Seitz have written a paper in which they compare the handling of the 1929 depression, the 2008/9 recession, India’s demonetisation exercise and Greece’s experience in their sovereign debt crisis and financial challenges starting 2009 until today.

The Bank of Canada has issued a Staff Discussion Paper that focuses on the retail side of the cash distribution system examining changes in cash accessibility as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Updates on upcoming conferences including: CBDC Conference, Future of Cash Conference, The Silk Road Conference on Cash and Payments, The Coin Conference, and the Cash & Payments Sustainability Forum.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has issued a report on India’s payment system. Part of that report benchmarks India against 21 countries.

Mobile money systems, of which M-Pesa is the best known, are evolving to the detriment of the network of agents who handle their transactions, according to a recent article in The Economist magazine.

Auriga has won the ATMIA’s cost of cash contest for the best white paper on how to improve cash management and logistics.

Schroders, a global asset management and wealth manager, has published a perspective piece, ‘Stablecoins: what they mean for the future of money’.

There is much talk of smart contracts in the National Bank of Denmark paper on payments. Whether in the context of CBDCs or other payments, they are frequently put forward as an attractive ‘prize’ worth pursuing.

The Bank of England has issued its climate related financial disclosure document for 2022, which builds on the significant progress made in 2021.

At the Intergraf conference the Banque de France presented on the access to cash situation in France and how it has changed since 2018. The good news is that access to cash remains good throughout France. However, there are indications of change.

The Bank of Canada (BOC) has issued a paper investigating the relationship of Bitcoin owners with cash. The paper is written in the context of understanding whether private digital currencies will make serious inroads into the use of cash, particularly for transactions.