The Mint Directors’ Working Group (MDWG) spoke at the Coin Conference about new research commissioned into the environmental impact of cash compared with digital payments.

Given how much cash is issued but held as a store of value, a paper entitled ‘Cash Money as a Saving Mode’ from Tampere University in Finland is useful and interesting.

The Dutch Payments Association has issued a report, ‘Study into the Costs and Revenues of Payment Services for Financial Institutions 2021’.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Financial Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) have issued a white paper on CBDCs.

Deutsche Bank research analyst Marion Laboure has written a paper, ‘Future Payments: Towards the End of Cash?’ following on from her 2020 piece on the same subject.

Tanja Heßdörfer was interviewed at the CBDC conference in August for this article. Tanja is Head of Sales and Business Development, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)s, at Giesecke+Devrient (G+D).

If you were not in Edinburgh for the Cash & Payments Sustainability Forum™ you missed something special, the first ever event dedicated to sustainability for this industry.

Just as open banking is allowing OneBanx to offer shared bank branches, a UK start-up is using it to offer merchants and alternative to Visa and Mastercard’s debit card payments. Atoa Payments has raised $2.2 million in a pre-seed funding round.

A newly issued Cash Innovation whitepaper by Koenig & Bauer Banknote Solutions takes a deeper look at why change and innovation are actually required in the way cash is organised and managed in society, while defining the problems that need to be fixed and how to fix them.

Just as the Federal Reserve is introducing new guidelines on card routing to increase competition, a campaign has started in the UK to get card fees reduced.

In 2019, 75% of US households had at least one general purpose credit card. Revolving consumer credit at the end of 2021 was over $1 trillion.

Denaria Platform is a Spanish association established to support payment choice through the maintenance of cash. It is working to ensure society is aware just how important cash is both economically and for financial and social inclusion.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has carried out a survey of cash use by businesses in the euro area. The survey was based on over 10,000 interviews and the analysis concentrated on businesses with the most interaction with consumers.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub have been working on Project Aurum.

Danmarks Nationalbank has issued a paper ‘Corporate CO2 communication is Not Associated with Fewer Emissions’. In the paper, annual reports of 141 large European companies were analysed to compare their communications about CO2 equivalent emissions with past, present and future developments in emissions.

The Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) conference took place at the very end of August in Frankfurt, the first CBDC conference in person, reflecting just how new CBDCs are.

Intelligent cash protection and custom control solutions provider Spinnaker International has rebranded to Secure Innovation.

Despite headline currency in circulation at near record levels, substantially less cash is being used in Australia.

The Future of Cash conference had a special seminar dedicated to the cost of payments with presentations by the US Federal Reserve, SNB, Bundesbank, ECB and Tobias Truetsch from the University of St Gallen.

The US Department of the Treasury has issued a report, ‘The Future of Money and Payments’. The report was requested by the President in the context of fast-moving changes to the US system of money and payments.