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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute has worked with Giesecke + Devrient (G+D) to issue a paper ‘Consumer Attitudes to CBDC: considerations for policy makers’. The paper includes an introduction to CBDCs and an overview of the rationale for CBDCs, the work being done around the world and the challenges being addressed.

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.

The latest Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub has been opened by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, joining Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Switzerland.

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

NatWest is committed to shaping and accelerating the UK’s cash cycle transition to a lower carbon economy. As part of this commitment in September 2020 NatWest brought together 36 organisations to discuss sustainability and the environmental impact of cash.

There is an assumption that cash is a driver of the shadow economy, but this is not proven by empirical evidence. Occasional paper 649 from the Banca d’Italia used the decision to increase the limit on cash usage as an opportunity to study what happened to cash and the shadow economy.

The Deputy Governor of the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ), Natalie Haynes, has put its work on CBDCs in the context of the government’s financial inclusion strategy. The BOJ sees a CBDC as an important tool in allowing people to access financial services and products.

Last month we reviewed the Bank of Canada’s report on the impact of the second wave of COVID-19 on cash usage in Canada. This month we consider a report using data from four countries, the UK, the US, Spain and Mexico, as well as the EU.

Turkey has a high rate of inflation and household demand for cash has been increasing steadily over the past ten years. The impact of the pandemic was, initially, a decrease in demand because of the shutdowns but, after vaccinations were introduced, demand recovered very quickly.

On 8 November 2016 it was announced that from midnight that night the two top denominations in India would no longer be legal tender. These two denominations represented 86% of the cash in circulation. A discussion paper from Monash Business School reviews findings from new modelling of that event that investigated the impact of that action on aggregate output, welfare and the size of the shadow economy in India.

Kantar, who deals in consumer knowledge and insights, wrote an interesting piece last year about how they can help businesses make the consumer experience better with all the benefits for customer satisfaction that come from it.

The Dutch National Bank (DNB) spoke at the recent European Cash Cycle seminar (ICCOS) about the McKinsey study commissioned to consider the cash infrastructure the Netherlands will need for the next 10 years. With cash transactions now representing 20% of all transactions, down from 32% pre-pandemic, the Netherlands is preparing for a less cash society.