With six weeks to go the CBDC Conference, which takes place online from 4-6 October, some 40 central banks have registered to attend and to listen to the 50 speakers who are confirmed in the programme.

Cash & Payment News™ didn’t go on holiday in August. Instead, it has focused on the environment, the importance of inclusion, a paper by ESTA on access to cash, a country profile of cash in Rwanda, a study of cash in Italy and the review of a BIS paper on CBDC privacy.

In the July edition of Cash & Payment News™ we report a mixed picture about the health of cash.

This month’s Cash & Payment News™ focuses on the environment, research on cash usage, payment challenges and token-based Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

This month we highlight a number of challenging areas for digital payments, rising card fees in the US and Germany, research that suggests people select banks based on branch proximity and that the pain of paying leads people to spend more and make unwise choices.

Cash & Payment News™ this month follows two main themes, payments and cash in a pandemic, along with a range of CashTech and other stories.

The theme of February’s Cash and Payment News (CPN) is very much on the future of cash and payments, considering as it does two sides of a coin, namely evidence of cash under pressure and the robust activity underway to keep it available, useful and preferred.