Cash resilience: the infrastructure question behind the future of payments

The importance of cash is growing as its role as a resilience asset, a financial inclusion mechanism and a contingency payment method is increasingly recognised. It is against this background that the International Association of Currency Affairs (IACA) has spent 18 months on a series of events exploring the future of key cash stakeholders [1].

On the surface things look good because, around the world, cash in circulation is growing between 2% and 5% annually by volume. At the same time the volume of digital payments is also climbing quickly. However cash transactional demand is often falling and that compresses the economies of the infrastructure that prints, moves, authenticates, and distributes cash.

And that’s the dilemma. At a policy level, cash is increasingly important but day to day in many places, cash usage is changing or even falling.