Monday focused on two key priorities: sustainability and cash promotion.
The plenary room was full for the workshop by the ICA Sustainability Committee. Chaired by Alexandra Peppmeier, industry, central bankers, academics and other experts worked through the tough choices required to make the cash cycle support our environmental goals: extending banknote life, reducing waste, improving efficiency, and treating environmental protection and operational reliability as reinforcing rather than competing goals. It was striking to see so many people in the room engaging together on questions that often get treated as somebody else’s problem.
In the Cash Promotion Workshop that followed, we tackled a question that has run like a thread through the rest of the GCF: how do we make the case for cash to policymakers, to the public, and to the next generation? Clémentine Cazalets of Monnaie de Paris walked us through her analysis of cash use around the world. Her conclusion: people want cash; what is changing is how they use it. Annette Holdermann and I then presented some of ICA’s work over the past twelve months: the “Summer of Cash” social media campaign, the continued growth of Cash Matters, the inaugural Global Cash Day, and the “Cash Welcomed Here” leaflets that put cash advocacy directly in the hands of small businesses.
Heimo Ertl of Geldservice Austria, part of the Austrian National Bank, then showed us what proactive central bank promotion looks like in practice: working with students, partnering with the chamber of commerce, even running a cash fan-shop. Austria remains the European benchmark.
On the theme of stronger together, we also brought our two coalitions into the room. Tanja Kulisch-Ziemens, Secretary General of the International Security Ligue’s Cash Chapter, described the work of the Cash Alliance we are building together, and its current focus on important improvements to the EU legal tender regulation now moving through the legislative process. Jim Pettit joined us from the United States to share how the Payment Choice Coalition is working on federal legislation that would ensure the US dollar is universally accepted as legal tender. Both reminded us that advocacy only becomes policy when we act together.
During the day we also hosted meetings of the members of the International Association of Currency Affairs (IACA) and the Banknote Ethics Initiative (BnEI), reinforcing the role of the GCF as the place where the currency community comes together.
Trust and the Value of Cash
Tuesday opened with a heartfelt welcome from Deputy Governor Gazi İşhak Kara of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. His vision: cash and digital currencies are not rivals but complements. And Türkiye proves the point: forty percent of daily transactions in the country are still cash-based, supported by one of Europe’s largest in-house printing infrastructures and a network that has demonstrated its resilience through pandemic, through earthquakes, and through financial volatility.
Mehmet Sercan Arslan, Director General of the Banknote Printing Plant, then unveiled the Bank’s first house note, “From Past to Future”, connecting Sardis, the birthplace of money, with the Istanbul Financial Centre. A reminder that the birthplace of money is exactly the right place to discuss its future.
Our keynote speaker, Thierry Breton, then lifted us out of the technical and into the geopolitical. His message stays with me: trust is eroding, and a balance-of-power world is emerging in its place. Sovereignty now extends deeply into the digital domain. Money equals trust, and currency institutions, he reminded us, sit at the very centre of that responsibility. Trust is the foundation of everything we do, and I am left with a constant question: what can we as individuals or organisations do to contribute to rebuilding trust?
And then, perhaps the practical centrepiece of Day One, Professor Julia Pitters, Pearl Kgalegi of the South African Reserve Bank, and Stefan Hardt of the Deutsche Bundesbank presented their work on the value of cash. Until now, everyone has only been looking at the cost of cash: the cost of production, of distribution… The value of cash for national security, resilience, privacy, inclusion, spending discipline, and support for local economies has been left uncalculated. The academic team led by Julia Pitters has developed a formula that puts the value of cash in Germany at 1.28 percent of GDP. That is about three times the cost of the cash cycle, and in absolute terms, around €52 billion. The early signals from the South African study point in the same direction, with inclusion and the informal economy weighing even more heavily. These are striking numbers, and they show that everyone has been looking at only one side of the balance sheet, the cost. When you calculate the value, you finally see the whole picture.
Following on was a discussion on sovereign payment ecosystems, exploring how cash and digital are interlinked and how they support the sovereignty of our national payment systems. Led by John Orchard, Chairman of the Digital Monetary Institute, with Rick Soedamah of the Central Bank of Suriname and Tim Hermans of the National Bank of Belgium, it was one of the deeper conversations of the Forum. Hearing two central bankers from contexts as different as their economies, and seeing how their perspectives complemented each other, was something delegates remarked on for the rest of the week.
