The UK’s second parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, has reviewed the work of the Bank of England and Her Majesty’s Treasury Taskforce that is working on the potential for introducing a retail Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the UK.

The Banque de France, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub have completed a cross-border wholesale CBDC experiment. Known as Project Jura, the experiment used tokenised assets on a distributed ledger (DLT) platform to settle cross-border transactions.

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 Bank of Canada wanted to understand the impact on cash withdrawals if people had to pay more to access cash. Staff working paper 202128 considers this question.

The Banknote & Currency Conference will take place, in person, on 21-24 February in Washington DC. Four weeks prior to the event, overall attendance matches the same stage prior to the 2019 Currency Conference, with particularly strong numbers of central banks and printworks.

Seigniorage income has long been a central bank source of finance which, if allowed to be retained, means central banks do not require direct funding from the government of the day in their country.

Four recent stories about digital payment crime highlight the changing profile of financial crime from payment cards to cryptocurrencies.

A CoinDesk columnist, J P Koning, has bravely made five predictions about the future of money.

As the number of ATMs and use declines, authorities face challenges relating to competition policy and appropriate regulations. The Bank of Finland is no exception and has written about their experience and the extensive academic work done on this topic.

Fear of COVID-19 transmission by banknotes remains in Taiwan despite the worldwide research that demonstrates the risks are extremely small, no more than touching any other object in a public space.

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.

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.

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?

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’.

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.

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.