What and how to measure environmental impacts, the power of procurement, improving the cash cycle and re-purposing unfit banknotes. Four areas for focus by the banknote community to make a difference. Practical lessons learned at the Cash & Payments Sustainabilty Forum December 2022.

The industry of Security printing comprising of printing of bank notes, manufacturing and usage of security inks, alongwith minting of coins which involves extraction, mining, smelting and melting of metals, burdens the environment with ill consequences. The talk will explore on green initiatives for procurement of raw materials, durability/life of banknotes, re-usability of paper wastage and spoilage, switching to renewable energy through gas boilers in place of oil fired boilers and practising Zero liquid discharge. Our industry must start considering the effect of production on environment, especially in view of the SDGs, the Paris Climate agreement, Tech COP27 on climate in Egypt. The world is moving towards sustainable practices, the concept of circular economy/ ESG and its time that we look at that while bringing in new changes and security features by making whole cash cycle greener and a robust Waste recovery pyramid.

Driven by the eagerness to further improve the existing systems for wiping solution recovery, WTG has developed a new solution to deal with the concentrated effluents from ultrafiltration. Considering the needs of customers with urban banknote printing facilities, facing the increasing difficulties with space and energy managements, in the design, the new system shall be placed on the market soon. The presentation will feature this City Design Dryer, its capabilities and advantages compared to other drying systems on the market and will further give an introduction to the pilot plant of the system at the WTG R&D site in Traiskirchen, Austria.

This immersion session provides a profound insight into the challenges faced by the National Bank of Poland following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. What was the role of the National Bank of Poland in meeting the increased demand for Polish currency and providing Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Poland with the possibility of exchange of Ukrainian Hryvnia into Polish Zloty, what were the main challanges, and how were they overcome?

Personnel are of central importance in the production of banknotes.

How can we ensure that the best personnel are selected, how should they be trained, and what conditions must be in place to ensure that they perform to the highest standards?

These questions will be discussed in this immersion session.

Our freedom to choose how to pay depends upon cash being widely accessible. Against this background, the presentation gives an overview on the availability of cash in Germany, using results of a population survey as well as data on the geographical distribution of cash access points. Access to cash is currently guaranteed in Germany. However, cash will only remain a widely used and attractive means of payment and store of value if central banks and credit institutions continue to provide adequate cash services.

Understanding how the payment landscape changes and how people in the euro area pay for products and services is of paramount importance to the Eurosystem. Taken from the second Study on the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area (SPACE), this presentation will shed insight on the payment behaviour and preferences of consumers in the euro area in 2022. While the move towards cashless payments continues, cash still plays an important role. The presentation will highlight recent developments in both online and point-of-sale payment methods. Furthermore, the presentation will convey important messages about the availability and acceptance of various payment methods.

In Q2 2023, an EU legislative proposal on Legal Tender for cash is expected. Apart from codifying existing jurisprudence related to acceptance of cash, the proposal will likely also contain some wording access to cash. Those two topics, acces to and acceptance of cash, were also addressed by a working group of the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) that Mr Bruggink co-chaired. He will shed some light on these developments.

A short overview of some aspects of cash management during wartime, including the efforts of the National Bank of Ukraine and its international partners to ensure Hryvnia exchnage abroad. Although, the NBU was actively promoting cashless means of payments since 2015, when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, people still turned to cash as a tool to manage uncertainty, significantly increasing demand for cash and taking hryvnia banknotes with them when fleeing the country.

This presentation will discuss the machine upgrade project Valora has implemented. It will shed light on the motivation of the project, the key challenges, and the solution that was finally adopted.

The presentation will guide the audience through PWPW's own solutions in the field of durability of substrates and banknote security.The use of an appropriate substrate has a positive effect on the life of the banknotes in circulation, while properly selected security elements protect the banknote against counterfeiting, making it at the same time visually attractive and keeping the production cost at a reasonable level.                                                               Apart from PWPW in-house solutions the presentation will show three examples of PWPW cooperation with innovations of its international partners in the industry.

The presentation will speak about the importance of keeping security feature parameters under control during banknote printing. In particular, the presentation will focus on measurement of various characteristics of UV stimulated emitters, like special inks and banknote substrate. PARVIS will also present ist recently released device, named UVision, capable of providing accurate measurements in laboratory environment or near the printing line.

Ever more efficient machines are producing ever larger quantities of banknotes. To ensure a consistently high quality of banknotes, quality assurance processes and equipment must keep pace with these developments. What are the challenges that arise in this context? What solutions are available? This presentation discusses these questions and shows possible solutions.

What will money look like in 2050? What institutions - if any - will issue it? How will we store and measure value? How will we settle transactions? Will cash play a role? A Futures literacy Lab hosted by CashEssentials and the UNESCO Chair for the Future of Finance, provides tools to imagine a monetary landscape, which promotes social and technological innovation. The future monetary landscape needs to improve inclusion, increase sustainability, reinforce resilience, and protect privacy and civil liberties. Cash offers different answers: the cash community needs to take a leadership role to design the cash of the future.

Both consumers and retailers prefer to have the option of choice when paying, and a plethora of payment methods, including cash, is available. In Europe, there seems to be a push to new cashless payments, notably with instant payments and possibly with a digital euro. What are driving these developments, and what could the payment mix look like in the future?

Despite the transactional decline of cash, it remains vital for many and also plays an important contingency role. The UK Government recognised the importance of maintaining access to cash and is giving the Bank of England new powers to ensure that the wholesale cash infrastructure remains effective, resilient and sustainable. These powers, currently before Parliament, complement legislative proposals on the retail side and are intended to safeguard access to cash into the future. The presentation outlines the Bank's new wholesale cash regime and its two core parts - market oversight and prudential supervision - and how it will be implemented in practice.

Security printing is complex and capital intensive, not only because of the high quality of the products used, but also because of the price of the machines. Protecting the investment is, therefore, of paramount importance.

Seprinto and Cattaneo-Ormag offer a high-end overhaul of printing machines. Not only will the electronics be brought up to the current level, but the machine will regain the splendour it has lost over time. All the original performances are guaranteed, and some modernisations are possible. The revamped presses are good for another 20 years of state-of-the-art banknote production.

The customers can count on the experience and know-how the team has aquired in almost 50 years.

In this session, the fundamental concepts and the methodology will be explained, and questions of the audience will be answered.

Nowadays, data collection during the banknote printing process is a must, not only for traceability and accountability reasons, but also to understand how the printing process is currently performing and to identify areas of improvement. PARVIS will present a live demonstration of real dashboards, showing what is already achievable today and what is on the roadmap for future evolutions. In this workshop PARVIS will suggest how to collect and use data during the printing process, to analyze trends and conditions that help decision makers to take conscious actions to improve their production and output.

Creating a new banknotes requires important decisions in different project phases.

This breakout session provides an overview of the key points that need to be considered, the main decisions to be made and the options that are available, to create a secure and beautiful banknote.

The financial services industry is in the midst of a significant transformation. Given the key role digitization plays in the financial lives of more and more of the world’s population, electronic payments are at the epicenter of this transformation.Payments are becoming increasingly cashless, and the industry’s role in fostering inclusion has become a significant priority. Banks, governments and commercial sector now need to define what their role will be in this evolution. And as banks currently pay 80% of the bill to provide cash, they need to find new ways to manage increasing costs of the cash infrastructure.

The end of cash has long been proclaimed repeatedly. In recent years, new forms of payment have emerged, creating additional pressure on cash. And as the latest form of payment, CBDC have appeared on the payment horizon.

And yet cash remains an indispensable means of payment in most parts of the world. 

But how will the payments landscape evolve, which payment methods will gain dominance, and which will lose? What role do customer needs play in this? These questions will be examined in this panel discussion.