The Bank of England published in its quarterly bulleting an update on cash. The headlines were that cash has made a partial recovery.

Until now the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has concentrated on wholesale Central Bank Digital Currencies (wCBDC), which are used with financial institutions.

Two MBA students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to give a percentage of their income in cash to impoverished people. They had studied the impact of government schemes in Mexico and Brazil and the results led them to want to take the same approach.

An article by Tristan Dissaux - ‘The Social Role of Money in an Age of Digitalisation' - pulls together much of the debate and thinking around the payment tension created by digitisation. As we end 2022, it is a good time to reflect on this.

A recent article on the Raconteur website looked at what the payment industry is doing on decarbonisation. It is worth having a look at what others are doing, particularly since cash is sometimes looked at in the frame of payments generally.

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 Swiss Innovation Hub of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has started project Tourbillon, which will explore how to improve cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy.

The settlement of a class action lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard in Canada has allowed retailers to pass on credit card fees to their customers.

Does paying with mobile digital payments increase consumers’ marginal propensity to consume? If there is to be an increase in the use of mobile payments this has implications for consumers, merchants and governments. A paper from Claremont Graduate University sets out to answer this.

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.

The National Bank of Ukraine has maintained the supply of cash and cash circulation to over 1,500 bank branches and more than 3,800 ATMs across the country since Russia invaded in February 2022. The Deputy Governor, Oleksii Shaban, has shared their experience.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.