Whilst we may all be tired of hearing about COVID-19 and its impact on just about everything to do with our everyday lives, it is important for those involved with cash and payments to examine its impact on cash and payments to date and perhaps, more importantly still, the implications for the future.

With the UN Climate Change conference, COP 26, taking place through early November, we thought it would be appropriate to review the environmental work of stakeholders in the cash industry over the last few years.

Whether CBDCs are designed as token- or account-based, regulations such as those governing money laundering and the funding of terrorism mean total anonymity/privacy is not possible. Given that while privacy is highly valued in principle, the public take little to no action to safeguard their privacy in practice, is it so important?

The future of cash is, without doubt, the most discussed, presented and written about topic in the cash and retail payments industry during the last 10 years. The topic took on a new dimension with the arrival of COVID-19, the effects of which feature in a discussion paper, titled simply ‘The Future of Cash’.

With under 100 days to go to the winter Olympics, China is encouraging domestic and foreign retailers to enable payment using the e-Yuan, China’s CBDC. Although foreign visitors will not be able to travel to China for the Olympics, it continues to work towards having the e-Yuan up and running.

The Economist’s 1843 magazine recently published an article, ‘The Mystery of the Missing £50 Billion’. It tells the story of a young lady caught at Heathrow with five suitcases containing nearly £2 million in banknotes.

There are concerns that with the UK’s contactless limit rising to £100, crime is more likely. In addition, the lack of ‘friction’ at the point-of-sale could increase the risk to retailers of unintended losses from consumers who present a card without it registering and then leaving the shop.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved the ProShares Bitcoin futures Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) application, the first cryptocurrency the US financial markets regulator has approved.

One-time passwords (OTP) are a central part of payment security. It is a concern, therefore, to read about hackers hijacking OTPs sent via SMS by Singapore banks to their customers, resulting in fraudulent credit card transaction worth S$500,000, as recently reported by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Quick Response (QR) codes, tiny black-and-white squares, can be read at ten times the speed of traditional bar codes; hence they were called ‘Quick Response’ codes or QR codes for short. They are two-dimensional black and white barcodes that can reveal a URL (web address) or other information with a scanning device.

The Bank of Canada (BOC) has a Currency Inventory Management Strategy (IMS) based on its high-speed sorters that capture the image of every banknote, including the serial number, along with the date the banknote was created, shipped from the central bank’s distribution sites and returned to them.

The subject of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has moved from ‘vague awareness’ in around 2016 to ‘big news’ today. To help people keep up, the publishers of Cash & Payment News™ (CPN) have decided to start publishing a weekly newsletter dedicated to CBDCs.

The Central Bank Payments conference has had to become virtual and will now take place as four separate half day events. These will be held on 8, 15, 22 and 29 November.

CashEssentials – the cash and payments think tank – has launched the CashTech Forum to promote innovation and technology, thereby ensuring a sustainable and future-proof cash ecosystem.

In place of the annual in-person Future of Cash Conference™, a series of virtual events have been staged. The most recent was an Asia Pacific-focused two-day virtual conference held across four themed sessions in July.

15 organisations across the entire cash cycle have contributed 61 separate case studies illustrating what they have done to reduce their environmental impact for a white paper which will be ready for the UN Climate Change conference (COP 26) starting 1 November. A further five organisations will be providing more examples.

The International Association of Currency Affairs (IACA) held its Excellence in Currency awards ceremony this month, the topic of which was 'Best Currency Initiatives Implemented in Response to The Covid-19 Pandemic’.

Project Dunbar involves the central banks of Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and Australia. The project, initiated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), is to test the use of CBDCs for international settlement.

GSMA has published the number of mobile money accounts in 2020 in different regions, and how many of them are active. The paradox is why are only 25% of registered accounts overall actually active?

In July Germany experienced severe flooding in some regions, as high as seven metres in the town of Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler for example. It also resulted in significant quantities of banknotes stored in homes and businesses being damaged by flood water contaminated with mud, sewage and oil.