Chris Skinner’s new book, The Intelligent Bank, is not about cash1. He writes about how banking, having become digital, is now on a journey to become intelligent. He argues that this requires a fundamentally new way of working because it requires smart data. There are, perhaps, two key lessons which apply to cash and the cash cycle.

Atlantic Council has published an article looking at the growth of using local currencies for cross-border payments rather than the US dollar. The article concludes that this change has been driven by a wish to reduce costs, limit exposure to foreign-exchange volatility, and lessen vulnerabilities stemming from reliance on a handful of major currencies for cross-border payment transactions.

In a speech at the Banknote Conference on payment choice by Victoria Cleland, the Bank of England’s Executive Director, Payments, cash took centre stage.

A consortium of major European banks are working on a privately-issued digital euro. However, the European Central Bank (ECB) argues that euro-denominated stablecoins are not an effective way to strengthen the euro’s international appeal.

18 months after the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) exited the mBridge cross-border project and launched Project Agorá, the fragmentation of cross-border payments has become almost institutionalised.

With 163 banknote issuing authorities, over 1,000 circulating banknote denominations and a similar number of coins, exploring currency trends can look daunting. Central banks, mints and treasury departments often need to understand design, substrate and security feature trends in the region and wider to explore options. Printers, designers, R&D departments and product managers, suppliers and cash cycle stakeholders also need this information.

The CPT Group has published a comparative analysis of recent consumer payments surveys from Switzerland, Australia, and Jamaica, drawing some striking parallels despite the three countries' very different payment landscapes.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) runs a number of annual surveys to understand payment trends over time and what is happening now. The latest is the 2025 survey of payment methods of 2,000 private individuals, consisting of a questionnaire and the keeping of a payment diary for a seven day period.

The 2025 Australian Consumer Payments Survey shows that cash use has stabilised in recent years.

Norges Bank has now published four reports that led it to conclude in December 2025 that introducing a CBDC was currently not warranted.

Franklin Noll of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has looked at where stablecoins are held and how they are used in the financial ecosystem in a Payments System Research Briefing.

Reuters reports the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is considering new controls for high-value transactions due to a rise in digital frauds.

OMFIF, an independent think tank for central banking, economic policy and public investment, has argued that cash plays a systemic role that no digital payment instrument, no matter how sophisticated, can replicate.

As geopolitical storms reshape global finance, cash is evolving into a strategic tool for sovereignty, resilience, and trust in an era of fragmentation and digital vulnerability.

This article was first published in February’s edition of Coin & Mint News™. The issue of estimated coin life has been a subject of speculation for a long time. There are limited data and systematic studies about the life of coins. Publicly available information from world mints suggests that coins could remain in circulation for at least 25 or 30 years. There are other sources suggesting that coins could last in circulation much longer and their lifetime could even exceed 50 years.

Hot on the heels of the Global Currency Forum come three more conferences.

A recent article in the Jamaica Observer focuses on Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), known as Jam-Dex . Unusually not only does the article argue for increased usage of the CBDC, but it gives detailed suggestions for how to do this.

Franklin Noll of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has looked at where stablecoins are held and how they are used in the financial ecosystem in a Payments System Research Briefing.

John Kiff, who writes as Kiffmeister, has written a series of papers considering the future of retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). He started by analysing the CBDCTracker.org database to see what has been happening to CBDC over time. His first findings were that projects are not leading to launches. Some projects have been put on the backburner and some cancelled, never getting out of the research or proof-of-concept phases. Many central banks have refocused to wholesale CBDC-backed tokenised deposits.

The European Payment Initiative and the Digital Euro aim to gain European payment independence from the US payment giants.