2024 has kicked off with a focus on cash, particularly a series of initiatives to safeguard access to cash.

A technical article by Manuel Muñoz and Oscar Soons, unusually, considers the role of CBDCs as a store of value instrument for consumers.

On 30 June 2022, Italy introduced a law fining merchants €30, plus 4% of the transaction value, if they did not accept a card payment. This law, along with vigorous promotion of card payments, has led Italy to having some of the highest rates of card accepting merchants per million inhabitants in Europe.

Why would JPMorgan Chase spend billions of dollars expanding its branch network while in the UK every retail bank is closing bank branches? Why would the Bank of Ireland invest heavily in new ATMs and refurbished branches while the UK looks at hubs and pods to serve their customers?

Dr Franklin Noll, a payments specialist who works as a Lead at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, has posted in LinkedIn an interesting piece on financial / payment inclusion. He has expressed his own opinions, not those of the Federal Reserve Bank.

A new version of the famous Monopoly board game has been created, ‘Monopoly Voice Banking’, that has replaced paper cash with a voice-activated banker.

This article provides summary of how payments are changing as technology changes and is adopted. Also, an update on AI ‘watermarking’.

The European Union has developed plans to reduce money laundering. This includes a limit on cash payments of €10,000 (versus €3,000 as previously proposed).

A Bank of Canada staff paper gives useful insight into financial exclusion. It does this in the context of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), but the findings have broad relevance to payments generally.

ATM Marketplace has identified three key areas for innovation for ATMs in 2024 – use of AI, video banking, and cash automation.

India’s economy has, like most countries, been buffeted by unexpected shocks over the last few years. Cash was disrupted by the November 2016 demonetisation exercise and by the pandemic.

Cash & Payment News™ (CPN) was first published in July 2018 as the successor to Payment News Quarterly. While Currency News™ focuses on the product that is ‘cash’, CPN has concentrated on the use of cash once issued.

The ECB is looking to sign five agreements worth about €1.1 billion for a four year pilot of a Digital Euro starting early 2025.

A Barbadian bank announced that it will introduce fees from 1 February.

In 2023 we continued to cover cash, payments and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). This article provides a swift summary of the year that was.

Even China isn’t immune from ‘less cash’. One bank, ICBC, has taken action in Taizhou in Jiangsu to remind people about the requirement for merchants to accept cash in its branches.

An International Monetary Fund paper uses data from Uganda to understand whether digital payment innovations, particularly mobile money payments, will increase financial inclusion and if it will reduce people’s preference for cash.

However you want to cut it, NCR Atleos (Atleos) is big in all thing’s ATMs. Data as of 23 June 2023, used in its September 2023 investor day, showed that it had over 800,000 installed ATMs.

Leon Schumacher, from Digital Ekho, gave the opening talk at the AI & CB (Artificial Intelligence and Central Bank) online conference in December. For those new to AI, it provided a fast overview of what AI is and some of the issues connected to it.

Whether you agree with Henry Ford, ‘History is bunk’, or George Santayana, ‘Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, a paper from the Department of Economic History at Uppsala University gives an interesting perspective on the risks of introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).