Fijians stand to benefit from important regulatory changes that will make everyday bank transactions easier, helping boost financial inclusion while supporting financial stability and economic activity, says the Reserve Bank of Fiji.

Morning Consult has written an article challenging whether banks should redefine the terms ‘unbanked’ and ‘underbanked’. The article argues that banks should focus on customers’ specific needs if they want to draw more people into financial services.

In late April, Germany’s federal administrative court pronounced its judgment in the legal challenge against the Hessischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, for its refusal to accept payments for an obligatory fee in euro cash.

Working paper 2713 from the ECB suggests policy interest in retail CBDCs has been driven by the decline in cash use and the rapid increase in digital payment types and use, challenging the status quo.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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’.