The Essential Role of Coins in Payments

Coins have many uses – in transactions, as collectors items, or for investment purposes. However, their core role is their use in payments, a role that is under threat as many countries move increasingly towards digital payments. But the importance of cash is paramount in a payments landscape and, as part of that, an efficient cash cycle cannot function without coins.

At the upcoming Currency Conference, a workshop will be held on 15 May dedicated to coins, focusing on their intrinsic, essential and yet often overlooked role in the cash cycle, examining their importance for payments, the challenges they face, and how they can be made more cost-effective and accessible.

The workshop will be run by Astrid Mitchell, Editor of Currency News™, and John Winchcombe, Editor of Cash & Payment News™, and will look at recent developments in the circulating coin landscape from four perspectives.

First will be the overall demand for cash (banknotes and coins) and recent trends.

Second, the workshop will address the issue of accessibility. Coins don’t tend to circulate – once issued, they are gone for good, leading to shortages and unnecessary replacement costs. This is due in part to the lack of facilities to deposit them. A number of central banks have introduced programmes to encourage the public to deposit coins and we will look at some of these.

Following on from this, the third perspective will be optimisation – and creating a more efficient coin cycle through an optimal denomination structure, including coin/note boundary, as well as more cost effective coins (in terms of composition and/or dimensions) that reduce the costs of circulation and ensure that their face value exceeds their production costs.

And finally, the workshop will look at the social dimension of coins – not only in financial terms (ie. the seigniorage that governments earn from coins), but also the more intangible benefits they bring in terms of convenience, financial inclusion, education and public engagement.

The workshop is open to all delegates at the Currency Conference, which takes place 15-18 May. More information can be found at https://web.cvent.com/event/6e25c736-e554-4765-bd4c-5cfd7d2e387d/summary.