Financial inclusion

Ghanaian authorities have been promoting digital payments well before the Covid-19 pandemic. However, currency in circulation is growing at a faster pace than digital payments.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, digital payments did not overtake cash as the main payment instrument in Nigeria, despite initiatives and incentives from the banking sector and fintech firms.

The Atlanta Fed announced the formation of a Special Committee on Payments Inclusion to find solutions for cash-reliant individuals to become better connected to innovative financial services.

In Mexico, cashless payments' advocates have seized on the Covid-19 pandemic to nudge consumers away from cash. But they conveniently forget the exceptional levels of financial exclusion in the country.

Saying there might be a problem with humanitarian cash transfers is like saying that you don’t think Baby Yoda is that cute... The problem is not with cash transfers per se, but with the financial technology we rely on to implement those transfers, and which makes possible and monetises surveillance on a scale never seen before.

We have succumbed to the inevitability of digitalisation and the associated monetisation of money, the cynical conversion of the public good called cash into its privatised digital equivalent. In the process, we are losing the social utility of cash.

The regional government of the Valencian Community in Spain has increased its subsidies to install rural ATMs. As ATM numbers decline in Western Europe, several countries see the public sector step in to fund the cash infrastructure.

A year after the Covid-19 pandemic spread globally, there is more data available to determine its impact on the use of cash in U.S. retail payments. The public has not stopped using cash, but some retailers have stopped accepting it altogether, threatening the economic well-being of large, vulnerable segments of U.S. consumers who use cash as their main means of payment.

For Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, financial inclusion will be a critical part of post-Covid-19 economic recovery. He recognises that cashless “is something we are not going to get to and probably shouldn’t”.

A case before the top European Court could have important implications for the status of banknotes and coins as legal tender and the acceptance of cash. In this second part, we analyse the link between legal tender and the exercise of fundamental rights. We also look at the implications of legal tender for a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

This webinar is the fifth in a series by CashEssentials exploring key trends shaping the future of cash. This is the first to focus specifically on ‘cash & crises’. Over the course of sixty minutes, cash industry experts and international aid practitioners will debate some of the advantages and disadvantages of digital cash assistance in the context of financial inclusion for societies in crisis.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a steady flow of disinformation has distorted the role cash may play in spreading Covid-19. Now, Australia’s national science agency has published a controversial study suggesting that the virus could survive up to 28 days on banknotes in strict laboratory conditions. However, the study’s lead author, confusingly, is minimizing the infection risk presented in his own work.