Reconnaissance International (RI), co-publisher of Cash and Payment News™ (CPN), is pleased to announce that it is moving to a new online platform incorporating a weekly newsfeed service alongside the monthly newsletter.

Cash Essentials, the independent initiative that seeks to provide a platform for debate about the payments and monetary ecosystems, has published its first edition of a Cash Glossary. The aim is to give the cash industry a shared vocabulary relating to payments and the cash cycle.

A recent Bank of Canada Staff Working Paper on ‘Safe Payments’ (2020-53) posed the question whether private payment systems based on bank deposits provide the optimal level of safety?

In the three months leading up to 9 December, NatWest, a UK bank, brought together 36 organisations to establish cross industry working groups to improve the environmental performance of the UK’s cash cycle. Three working groups were set up looking at energy, plastics and CO2 to establish best practice and to drive change.

In December RBR ran an online conference for Self-Service Banking Europe. There is much in the news about attacks on ATMs and this was one of the areas of interest in the conference. Paul Nicholls from Oberthur Cash Protection, Spencer Marshall from HID Global and Duane Campbell from Tesco discussed what they are doing in this area.

Thus said Ralph Wintergerst, CEO of Giesecke + Devrient (G+D), to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper before Christmas. G+D has invested significantly in this area to position itself for the future and to support its worldwide relationships with central banks. It is confident that cash will remain a core payment instrument but sees a future shift to Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

​UK Finance, who represent the banking industry, are reported by The Times newspaper to have asked the Treasury to increase the contactless payment limit from £45 to £100. Prior to the COVID pandemic the limit had been £30. The Financial Conduct Authority would have to approve any change.

At the ICCOS Americas online conference there was, unusually, a coin panel, ‘Coin, coin everywhere and not a cent to spend.’ The focus was on what had happened to coins in the US in the pandemic, why a Coin Task Force had had to be set up and what the situation is now. The panel consisted of Kathleen Young from the Federal Reserve Cash Services Product Office, Ashley Yayock from Walmart, Thomas Strauser from Loomis, JR Davis from Davis Bankcorp and Linda Sherry from National Priorities Consumer Council.

Commercial banks are at the heart of the cash cycle and their branches have been their key customer touchpoint. If you read the news section on bank branches, you might think they are to become a side show for commercial banks. RBR held an online conference on branch transformation at the end of November. The move by customers online, using apps and telephone banking is accelerating a trend to slim down branch networks, and so this event was a useful insight into the future branch.

The Bundesbank (BBk) provides 25.5% of the fully paid capital that underpins the European Central Bank (ECB), but it has brought into circulation 29.9% of the value of coins in circulation (€8.46 billion). This figure has been stable for some time.

Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, made a speech about the move to digital payments. Despite all the innovation of credit cards, ATMs, faster payments, open banking etc., he quoted Thomas Philippon, Professor of Finance at the New York University Stern School of Business, who estimates that the unit cost of financial services has hardly changed over the last century.

Allied Universal has offered 245 pence in cash for each G4S plc share and agreement on the terms of the offer have been reached. This values the company at £3.8 billion, representing a premium of about 68% to the closing price of G4S shares on 11 September 2020, and an 11% premium to the highest closing price in the previous year. GardaWorld had offered 235 pence per share, some 4% less. G4S Directors intend unanimously to recommend that their shareholders accept the offer.

YouGov have carried out a survey in 21 countries asking about payments in the pandemic, which provides an interesting snapshot on the relative impact of COVID-19 on cash usage around the world.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published the results of a major study into the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area (SPACE) and compared it with a similar 2016 study (the SUCH study on the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area). It also published results of another large scale interim 2020 survey, the impact of the pandemic on cash trends (IMPACT) survey.

Did much happen this year? A moment to reflect.

In its latest Quarterly Bulletin, the Bank of England published an article ‘Cash in the time of COVID’. The article seeks to explain what it referred to as the cash ‘paradox’, that cash in circulation is up while cash transaction volumes are down, which has been brought into sharp relief during the pandemic.

Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) are a less talked about element of the CBDC conversation, perceived as more operational than revolutionary. However, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has successfully concluded a proof-of-concept project with the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and SIX to explore the performance of the technology to integrate a tokenised digital asset and central bank money.

The Dutch National Bank (DNB) has commissioned a medium-term study to consider the cash infrastructure needed by the Netherlands. In October 2020 the DNB estimates that cash use at the point-of-sale had fallen to 20%.

On 15 December a new approach to branch banking started in the UK. OneBanks has partnered with the Co-op retailer to open a fully staffed kiosk in the shop. Although opening in December, it only goes fully live in January. The kiosk is opening in Denny, a Scottish town which has not had any banking facilities for over two years. It is estimated 40% of Scottish towns have one or fewer bank branches.

The Libra Association has rebranded itself as the Diem Association, its payment service operator will be called Diem Networks and its currency the Diem Dollar. Its Calibra blockchain group, responsible for the digital wallet that will hold the Diem Dollar, has already been renamed Novi.