On 1 & 2 October 2026, the fourth edition of the “Shaping a New Reality of Cash” conference was held in Warsaw, impeccably organised by the Narodowy Bank Polski (NBP). The conference combined academic rigour with central bank pragmatism under the theme “Towards resilient and user-centric cashMoney in physical form such as banknotes and coins. More markets”. Opening the conference, Paweł Szałamacha Member of the Management Board of the NBP set the stakes with a vivid illustration of why cash matters in Europe: when Russian drones entered Polish airspace last year, citizens rushed to the ATMs and withdrew 6 billion zloty — some €1.4 billion — in a single day, the third-largest daily withdrawal since the pandemic.
Four themes stood out.
Prof. Franz Seitz (Weiden Technical University) confronted a long-standing asymmetry in the cash debate: the costs of cash are routinely quantified, while its benefits are acknowledged but unmeasured — “hard to quantify, so we don’t do it.” Seitz shared the results of the quantitative measure of the value of cash applied to Poland and Germany. As Seitz put it: “What we measure affects what we do.”
The paperSee Banknote paper. More quantifies the positive externalities of cash across six dimensions — resilience, privacy and data protection, inclusion, budget control, local societal significance, and the fee-restraining discipline cash exerts on the card industry — combining them into a Cash Value Indicator (benefits as a share of GDP) and a Cash Perception Index (a 0–100 measure of emotional attachment).
The results are striking. In both countries, the value of cash exceeds its costs: around 1.19% of GDP in Germany (two to three times the cost estimates) and roughly 1.5 times costs in Poland. Perceived value is high in both (79 and 76 out of 100 respectively), with Poland standing out on resilience on trust: 70% of Poles consider their banknotes national symbols.
The framing matters politically. If cash has the characteristics of a public good — like national defence or paved roads — then it is legitimately funded from general revenues, and government-imposed cash restrictions become self-contradictory. Gerhard Rösl (OTH Regensburg) was blunt about the inconsistency: governments emphasise the stabilising role of cash in crises, yet fail to support it in normal times — imposing restrictions on its use while leaving the economics of its distribution to deteriorate.
If the value case for cash is strengthening, the supply side is moving the other way. The “ATM paradox” presented by Guillaume Lepecq (CashEssentials) shows cash in circulationThe value (or number of units) of the banknotes and coins in circulation within an economy. Cash in circulation is included in the M1 monetary aggregate and comprises only the banknotes and coins in circulation outside the Monetary Financial Institutions (MFI), as stated in the consolidated balance sheet of the MFIs, which means that the cash issued and held by the MFIs has been subtracted (“cash reserves”). Cash in circulation does not include the balance of the central bank’s own banknotes (as... More growing in most countries, while the ATM network that distributes it contracts almost everywhere: Germany’s ATM estate is half its 2008 peak, Belgium is losing roughly 12% a year, Brazil lost a fifth of its fleet in five years.
Crucially, the decline is supply-driven, not demand-driven: across 37 countries, the correlation between transactional cash use and ATM contraction is a negligible 0.19. This is a business-model failure. Operators control neither their volumes nor their main revenue line — ATM interchange fees are set behind closed doors by card schemes and issuing banks, often fail to cover costs.
The knock-on effects were quantified across the sessions. Access gaps are widening: two-thirds of French municipalities have no cash access point at all, and rural travel distances run four times urban ones (Trütsch et al.). Affordability is deteriorating at the merchant end: Bundesbank cost data show cash is still the cheapest instrument per transaction but costs are rising precisely because shrinking ATM and branch networks make merchant deposits slower. And in many countries acceptance is no longer guaranteed. There is good news too: fixes exist and work, from India’s regulated ATM interchange, to Poland’s ATM cost study, to public co-funding of ATMs in Austria, Spain and France.
Prof. Jay Zagorsky (Boston University) delivered the conference’s most contrarian finding. Looking at the Iberian power outage, Jamaica’s Hurricane Melissa and the war in Ukraine, he found that cash in circulation shows only short-term bumps after disasters — no durable increase in real cash per person months later. Households do not durably self-protect. Yet crises do trigger panic demand — the drone-intrusion withdrawals recalled in Szałamacha’s opening being the Polish case in point.
The gap between crisis behaviour and everyday behaviour is the central policy problem. The moneyFrom the Latin word moneta, nickname that was given by Romans to the goddess Juno because there was a minting workshop next to her temple. Money is any item that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular region, country or socio-economic context. Its onset dates back to the origins of humanity and its physical representation has taken on very varied forms until the appearance of metal coins. The banknote, a typical representati... More withdrawn in the drone episode never returned to the banking system — precautionary demand is real, but it coexists with declining everyday use — and a cash infrastructure cannot be rebuilt mid-crisis: no CIT capacity, no ATMs, no trained handlers on demand. Resilience must be built in normal times, and the conference offered a template in three parts.
Design: Latvia has moved from a memorandum of understanding to binding regulation — maximum 20 km to an ATM, minimum ATM numbers, guaranteed opening hours, €750 of free withdrawals per month — plus a designated network of 109 “critical ATMs” required to keep operating in crises, with replenishment capacity and backup power.
Funding: if the cash ecosystem has public good attributes, then public cost coverage is legitimate — e.g. Austria’s partial central bank funding of ATM provision.
Testing: Seitz proposed stress-testing the cash cycleRepresents the various stages of the lifecycle of cash, from issuance by the central bank, circulation in the economy, to destruction by the central bank. More as central banks already stress-test banks — what happens in a two-week power outage? — and the Bundesbank confirmed it has already performed a first crisis exercise through its National Cash Forum, with a second agreed.
The final theme ran through both days: cash has almost no advertising, while card schemes spend billions on “convenience” messaging. Central bank neutrality, Seitz argued, is not neutrality but a negative stance toward its own most public product. The Bundesbank’s Matthias Callen saw a strategic opening: the war in Ukraine gives central banks a window to move from neutrality to active promotion under the resilience banner — warranted by the growing gap between belief and behaviour in Germany, where more people say cash matters to them than those who use it on a regular basis.
The tone question divided the room. Zagorsky’s answer: people love sugar and hate fear — day-to-day communication should stress inclusion and equality, not blackouts and war. As NBP’s Barbara Jaroszek put it in her closing, the paper map only becomes vital when your phone dies — but only if you still have it and know how to read it. The same, she reminded the room, is true of cash.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Narodowy Bank Polski.