The EU is introducing a new maximum limit of €10,000 on cash payments as part of a programme to stop money laundering. Individual countries are free to set their own lower limit.

The British Retail Consortium has just published its 2021 survey of its members who account for 36% of total UK sales from 25,000 shops. While card usage soared, so has the cost of card payments, prompting the BRC to demand emergency intervention by the government to prevent price gouging by the card companies.

Italy’s new government intends to scrap the requirement to accept electronic settlements for purchases below €30 and to raise it to €60, according to a draft of its 2023 budget recently approved by the cabinet.

One of the sessions at the Cash & Payments Sustainability Forum™ addressed today’s cash management challenges, and featured presentations by Loomis, FedCash® Services, G+D and Koenig and Bauer Banknote Solutions.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.