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The GSMA has published its annual State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money. It revealed a dramatic acceleration in mobile transactions during the COVID-19 pandemic as lockdown restrictions limited access to cash and financial institutions. The report found that the number of registered accounts grew by 13% globally in 2020 to more than 1.2 billion. The fastest growth was in markets where governments provided significant pandemic relief to their citizens. To minimise the economic toll of COVID-19, many national governments distributed monetary support to individuals and businesses, and the value of government-to-person payments quadrupled during the pandemic.

This Bank of Canada study examines how the pandemic has influenced the demand for and use of cash using data from its Bank Note Distribution System. These data show that the value of notes in circulation grew sharply in March and April. Part of the increase reflects precautionary steps taken by financial institutions to increase their cash inventories during the pandemic, given concerns about possible disruptions to cash transportation services, and to reduce the risk of cash stockouts from potential customer demand. The flow of cash deposits from retailers to financial institutions, which would typically help replenish institutions' note inventories, was disrupted during the pandemic. As a result, financial institutions compensated for this shortfall by drawing cash from the Bank of Canada.

The Bank of Canada published a paper that provides an analysis of cash trends in Canada before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It finds that cash demand has been strong pre-pandemic and increased sharply during the pandemic. While cash use fell initially due to the decreased number of in-person shopping opportunities, it recovered as containment measures eased. The paper concludes that the long-term trend away from cash use as a method of payment could lead to a decline of merchant acceptance over time and erode the broader demand for cash more generally, which could warrant the Bank of Canada issuing a digital dollar.

"In recent years, the rise in digital payment innovations such as contactless cards and Interac e‑Transfer has spurred a discussion about the future of cash at the point of sale. The COVID-19 pandemic has also contributed to this discussion: While consumers reported that some merchants started to refuse cash early on in the pandemic, such reported refusals dropped as the pandemic progressed. The Bank of Canada's most recent Merchant Acceptance Survey (MAS) took place in 2018, prompting a need for updated data to study merchant cash acceptance, payment trends and conditions for the potential issuance of a central bank digital currency (Lane 2020, 2021a). Against this background, the Bank conducted the 2021-22 MAS Pilot Study to monitor payment methods accepted by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Survey data was collected from merchants in two batches, in late 2021 and early 2022. Our results show that 97% of SMBs in Canada accepted cash in 2021-22 and only 3% have plans to stop accepting cash. For cards and digital payments, merchant acceptance has increased since 2018. Additionally, the acceptance of different payment methods varies by the size of the merchant, industry and region."

The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched a campaign to encourage the public to use digital payment platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic. Supported by the Association of Banks, the MAS is promoting platforms PayNow, PayNow Corporate and SGQR. SGQR is a common quick response code for electronic payments. It creates a single "multi-tenanted" QR for each merchant, supported by central infrastructure.

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a wrench into the Canadian government review of open banking, causing concern that the delay could further wound financial-technology companies, while leaving scores of Canadian consumers sharing their financial data in potentially risky ways.

"As anticipated in our 2019 year in review, there were significant and notable developments in the Canadian Fintech industry in 2020. These occurred in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the growth of some segments of the Fintech industry (notably for example, point-of-sale ("buy now, pay later") lenders, businesses facilitating digital onboarding/ ecommerce and/or cashless transactions), while presenting challenges for others (such as small business lenders and travel focused lenders). In contrast to the approach taken in some other countries (in particular, the United States), Fintech entities in Canada did not participate in deploying pandemic government relief to businesses in Canada."

According to a new BIS paper, e-commerce has ramped up during the pandemic around the world. The growth has differed across sectors and over different stages of the pandemic. Novel data sources can help to follow these trends. It found that the growth of e-commerce has been higher in countries where there were more stringent containment measures and where e-commerce was initially less developed. It speculates that some changes in consumers' shopping habits and payment behaviour may be longer-lasting, and have implications for structural change and the growth of the digital economy.

While scaling mobile cash transfers quickly to help alleviate the impact of the pandemic, governments should take a broad approach that goes beyond the technology and consider the whole ecosystem behind a robust and resilient mobile program. A holistic approach should be considered by policymakers and the industry to integrate all the "building blocks" of a sustainable mobile-money platform, including stakeholders and design and policy elements that help maximize benefits against risks.

Global payments revenue in the first six months of 2020 contracted 22%, or $220 billion, from a year ago due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to McKinsey & Company. The management consultancy expects revenue for the entire year to be about $140bn lower than in 2019, a 7% decline from a year earlier. Consumers in certain geographies seem to be paying off credit-card balances in preparation for the challenging times seen ahead. The pandemic has also accelerated the move from physical to virtual banking, with banks in various countries closing branches and ATMs. Investments in instant payments have begun to reap greater benefits, both in point-of-sale and e-commerce.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper uses a new "Future of Payments" database to document a number of salient patterns of retail payment behavior during and after the pandemic. It finds that cash in circulation, use of card-not-present transactions and downloads of payment apps all spiked when the pandemic was more severe (ie during strict lockdowns, periods of restricted mobility and periods with higher numbers of new cases). However, changes were less pronounced in countries with higher mobile penetration, and recent data suggest that some effects reversed once lockdowns were eased, and mobility rebounded.

Government-to-person (G2P) payments have never been more important, as governments worldwide seek for ways to respond to the economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Eighty-four countries have reported changes to their social protection systems in response to the pandemic; fifty-eight countries of these are scaling up cash transfer schemes.

The Bank of Canada's work to prepare its contingency plan for launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC) has accelerated, driven by a sharp decline in the acceptance of cash. If this trend continues beyond the pandemic and/or private digital currencies take hold as means of payment, the Bank could be pushed over the edge. If the latter scenario emerges, a central bank, with no commercial motivation to harvest data, is uniquely positioned to build into its digital currency safeguards for privacy, while at the same time defending against criminal uses. Universal access would need to be another key feature of a central bank digital currency. Meanwhile, the Bank has been researching and experimenting with different technologies, and engaged three university project teams to independently develop proposals for what a digital currency ecosystem could look like. Their reports will be published on February 11.

The outbreak of Covid-19 has caused a global increase in the amount of cash in the economies of Canada, Europe, US, and the UK. But the big increase in cash-in-circulation is not due to an increase in withdrawals of cash. There is much less cash being returned to banks and ATMs - businesses and individuals simply aren't redepositing their banknotes. This article argues that is probably being driven by an unwanted accumulation of cash by crooks, because the network of restaurants and other businesses that they rely on to launder their funds have all shut down thanks to virus fears and lockdowns. So throughout the pandemic they have been accumulating ever more cash from the drug using customers, with no place to offload it.

Payments firm Square recently began holding back between 20% and 30% of the money it collects from some customers - claiming that it does so to protect against risky transactions - in a move that has sparked an outcry from small businesses in financial distress during the pandemic. The firm described the withholdings as part of its "rolling reserve" policy, adding that it had started the practice late last year and expanded it after the pandemic began to "protect buyers." The company claimed that it applied the reserves policy on more "risky" sellers who sell goods or services more prone to disputes or who take prepayment for a service to be delivered at a future date.

Despite the global coronavirus pandemic, U.K. fintech funding saw a slight uptick in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. Fintech investments were up 3.8% in the first half of 2020 to just over £2bn, up from £1.9bn in the first half of 2019. The slight increase can largely be attributed to a surge in investment across insurtech and payments startups. Investment in insurtech saw the largest increase, increasing by 66% from £97m in 2019 to £161m in 2020 and payments-focused fintechs followed, seeing a 5.3% increase on 2019 to £760m.

In the United Kingdom during the Covid-19 pandemic the way people use cash has changed, with less being used for transactions. However, the total value of banknotes in circulation has increased as people appear to choose to hold more cash. These trends have persisted for a number of years, but have been magnified by the pandemic. People seem to be holding more cash for contingency reasons, in line with cash's established role as an emergency means of payment. Also, cash use - particularly in non-retail environments - may have recovered as lockdown measures eased and economic activity picked up, but cash is taking longer to be deposited.

Payments Canada published its annual Canadian Payment Methods and Trends 2021 report, which analyzed 20 billion payment transactions made in 2020, totalling $9.4 trillion, and discusses trends that are transforming the Canadian payment landscape. It confirmed that the Covid-19 pandemic further accelerated migration to digital and contactless payments and growth in online transfers, with a decline in cash and cheques. Credit cards remain the most used payment method, followed by debit cards.

"The deficit recovery periods of defined benefit schemes with valuations in 2020-21 was impacted by the pandemic-led crisis, with these schemes having a smaller reduction than expected, according to new analysis."

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance {CCAF} published its third global fintech regulator survey. It aims to understand the extent to which policymakers continue to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic as we move away from the crisis. The survey provides insights into the types of consumer risks that have emerged because of the pandemic and the impact of such risks on policy objectives. It also explores the important role of IT systems and infrastructures in supporting oversight and supervision across fintech verticals.