Amazon has decided to continue to accept Visa credit cards in the UK, reversing its decision to stop on 19 January. The reason for the change of heart is not clear but it is assumed that Amazon will have negotiated price concessions from Visa.

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure carried out a survey of central banks in Latin America and the Caribbean asking about their work on CBDCs on behalf of the Bank for International Settlements.

Peterson Ozili has written a paper looking at the possible benefits of bringing the unbanked into the formal financial sector. In addition to listing the arguments for and against, he also includes a literature search outlining their key conclusions.

This paper looks at the implications of currency substituting that go beyond the functions of central banks, to consider the key differences in monetary policy and LLR, and to assess the implications and risks of currency substitution and how they vary between countries.

An offline ability to use CBDCs could make them more inclusive for those who find the digital world hard to access. This paper considers whether an expiry date on CBDCs would add to the usefulness of CBDCs.

With 14% of central banks at the pilot stage of exploring a possible future Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), this paper seeks to address three related questions; What would be the demand for a CBDC?, How would different design attributes affect demand?, and To what extent would a CBDC impact the demand for cash and deposits?

The Bank of Canada has considered what the impact of introducing a cash-like, deposit-like or universal CBDC would be on consumption, banking and welfare.

BankServ Africa builds and operates essential payment infrastructure in South Africa and 20 other countries. It operates as a utility with a mutual ownership structure of Nedbank, Absa Bank, the Standard Bank of South Africa and FirstRand Investment Holdings.

When one looks at the pandemic data it consistently shows a drop in cash usage, as it does here in Belgium. However, the nuance perhaps points to a different story.

Amazon has announced that from 19 January 2022 in the UK it will stop accepting Visa credit card payments due to their high cost. This follows the post-Brexit removal of the interchange cap imposed by the European Commission. Amazon has also introduced surcharges on Visa credit cards in Singapore and Australia.

Philip Lowe, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), spoke recently at a conference about the future of payments in Australia. He said that the direction of change was ‘pretty clear’.

Post offices are often proposed as a solution to providing access to cash. The US Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives have argued that this is to fundamentally misunderstand the case of the unbanked.

12 editions of Cash & Payment News™, 12 weeks of Digital Currency News™. What have we learnt? What has changed?

A paper by the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF), ‘Cash: A Blessing or a Curse?’, examines what happened in Mexico when changes to cash availability were made.

Westpac, a major Australian bank, has re-designed its point-of-sale (POS) terminals to help blind and visually impaired people use them more easily. 110,000 machines are being changed for Android-based devices with new functionality.

The Turkish lira is sharply down in value this year, over 40%. On 24 November bitcoin hit a new all-time high after the lira dropped 15% on the news of President Erdogan defending the reduction in interest rates in Turkey at a time of 20% inflation.

The UK is facing significant pressure on its cash infrastructure, sufficient to put access to cash on the political agenda. 2021 draws to a close with a major announcement that some of the largest UK banks will create a network of shared banking hubs to maintain cash facilities for communities where cash services have ended.

In November 2021 the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) Working Group on Access and Acceptance of Cash ERPB issued its report.

David Fagleman, of the consultancy Enryo, has recently presented and written about cash in circulation (CIC). He makes the case that CIC data provided by central banks is unhelpful because it overstates the case for cash usage and creates confusion about what is actually happening.

At OMFIF’s European payments and digital assets conference CBDCs were on the agenda. Wholesale CBDCs are more familiar ground for central banks since they can be regarded as exploiting a technological opportunity rather than a major structural change.