The Bank of England has issued its Annual Report for 2022. The key themes relating to banknote issuance and management were the completion of the polymer series of banknotes with the issuance of the £50 banknote, actions to safeguard access to cash and deposit services and the environmental impact of banknote operations.

When handling cash, we normally glance at each banknote for less than a second. Central banks and banknote issuers are coming to realise that this brief glimpse provides a crucial opportunity for public authentication.

The Swiss National Bank has conducted a Life Cycle Analysis on its 9th series of banknotes. The study looked only at those elements of the life cycle directly under the control of the SNB, the manufacture, wholesale distribution and disposal of notes.

One the sessions at the Banknote & Currency Conference was ‘Perception Studies: Producing Actionable Information to Support Data-Driven Decision Making’, in the context of: what are the most effective features on a banknote? What do people use to authenticate them? What captures their attention and how do we know?

As part of our series of articles around the world to assess the growing trend to digital payments and what these countries are doing to ensure ongoing access to cash in a less-cash world, this month it’s the turn of New Zealand.

Amir Safranovich, Head of Cash Management in the Currency Department at the Bank of Israel (BOI) introduced his presentation at the European Cash Cycle Seminar with the title ‘Cash: The Point of No Return’.

The Bank of Canada (BOC) has a Currency Inventory Management Strategy (IMS) based on its high-speed sorters that capture the image of every banknote, including the serial number, along with the date the banknote was created, shipped from the central bank’s distribution sites and returned to them.

While cash transactions in Japan have been declining for some time, the reduction in opportunities to pay in cash and the increased use of ‘stay at home consumption’ during the pandemic has accelerated this decline. At the same time the ratio of banknotes to GDP has risen very significantly.

Many technologies and features with their roots in commercial printing have made, and continue to make, a substantial contribution to secure document production. However, these technologies have for the most part been concerned with producing visual colours, perceived by the unaided eye as conventional colour printing.

The Dutch National Bank (DNB) spoke at the recent European Cash Cycle seminar (ICCOS) about the McKinsey study commissioned to consider the cash infrastructure that the Netherlands will need for the next 10 years.