Cash Crisis? What Crisis?

There is a very significant focus on the challenges faced when people choose to pay digitally rather than with cash. It seems to be a, if not the, core theme of conferences, publications and public policy wherever you go. Why? And should it be? Two papers reported in this edition suggest it should not – the high volume economies report from the Global Currency Forum (GCF) and the Currency Research Cash Resilience paper.

The first reason lies in the implications of what is happening combined with the speed of change. When changes to cash usage arrive, it often accelerates making the status quo of the cash cycle unviable. Inevitably the private sector, motivated by profit, moves faster than state institutions and cash acceptance and access infrastructure disappears steadily and swiftly.