Cash in Canada – Maureen Carroll – [Season 2 | Episode #13]

Jens Seidl 00:00:33 Welcome to another episode of the P.I.T. Exchange: Payments, Innovation and Technology, which was a special guest from Canada with us today, Maureen Carroll from the Bank of Canada. Welcome, Maureen.

Maureen Carroll 00:00:44 Thank you. Great to be here.

Jens Seidl 00:00:46 So, as usual, I’d like to start with a few icebreakers for our session and get to know Maureen, the person a little bit before we talk about work and payments and innovation and technology. So maybe let’s start with the really simple one. We prefer tea or coffee?

Maureen Carroll 00:01:00 Definitely coffee.

Jens Seidl 00:01:01 Okay. Keep you awake.

Maureen Carroll 00:01:03 It does. And I have to say, unless I’m in the UK, for some reason, tea tastes so much better there.

Maureen Carroll 00:01:07 So sometimes when I’m in the UK, I do lean a little bit more towards tea, but my default is coffee.

Jens Seidl 00:01:13 That is so true. I was never into tea until I lived for five years in the UK, and that’s where I changed my habits. Definitely. Another question. Vacations. What’s your favorite type of vacation or what’s been your last vacation? What do you like to do?

Maureen Carroll 00:01:28 Definitely top of mind because I just came back from a fabulous vacation in Portugal, where I went to the island of Madeira and my first time in Madeira and the island did not disappoint. It was fantastic hiking trails, scenery, really incredible driving conditions, fantastic structure and roads. But I don’t think I’ve done that many hairpin turns in a single day in my driving career so far.

Jens Seidl 00:01:56 Do you get a sporty car to do that too?

Maureen Carroll 00:01:58 Yes, I was more concerned with just enough power to get up the hills and around the corner, so it all worked out really well.

Jens Seidl 00:02:05 That sounds fun. Great. And the last question what’s your favorite cuisine?

Maureen Carroll 00:02:10 I would say my favorite is Peruvian.

Jens Seidl 00:02:13 Oh that’s insane.

Maureen Carroll 00:02:15 Yes, I had the opportunity to be in Peru about 15 years ago, and ever since I’ve sought out fantastic Peruvian restaurants wherever I am. Because the cuisine is amazing.

Jens Seidl 00:02:26 Oh, excellent. Do you like the Pisco sours as well?

Maureen Carroll 00:02:29 Yes. Those are also great.

Jens Seidl 00:02:30 Oh, yeah. Nice. All right. Well, thank you for that. And with that, maybe let’s talk a little bit about yourself in a work context. So you’re with the Bank of Canada. I already spilled those beans. But if you tell us a little bit more what you do there and then how you got into that position.

Maureen Carroll 00:02:44 Yeah. So I’m the managing director of the currency department at the Bank of Canada, where we are responsible for the full currency lifecycle from design and production of banknotes, distribution, and also research related to cash and payments more generally. I’ve been in this role for about eight years now, and I’ve been with the bank for just over 20 years. I’ve worked in various areas of the bank, including our funds management group on retail debt.

Maureen Carroll 00:03:10 I also did a stint in our IT department, where I was the deputy CIO, and I had worked with currency in the past, but came back into this role in 2018.

Jens Seidl 00:03:21 All right. So in that role, you’re both responsible for the design and production of the banknotes as well as then the actual distribution. Is that right?

Maureen Carroll 00:03:29 That’s right. Yeah.

Jens Seidl 00:03:30 Okay. Well let’s talk about distribution a little bit because I think there have been some changes in Canada over the last ten, 20 years or so. And maybe you can start with explaining to us what the current landscape actually looks like and who’s responsible for what.

Maureen Carroll 00:03:44 Sure. So in Canada, we have a model where the central bank is responsible for wholesale distribution of cash. So we do that through our two cash operations centres that are in Toronto and Montreal. So two of our largest urban areas, and we distribute across the country from those two areas, and we distribute to a subset of our commercial bank. So there’s a group of commercial banks that are part of our banknote distribution scheme.

Maureen Carroll 00:04:11 They enter into an agreement with the Bank of Canada. And they we provide them with their notes. They also may provide cash services to other financial institutions that are not part of the distribution, but they are ultimately responsible for the retail level distribution. So we process notes that come back to the bank that are either unfit or surplus to the needs of the network, and those member financial institutions operate their own cash centres across the country, where they, as members, have the opportunity to have a Bank of Canada reserve within those centers. So some of the changes that we’ve seen since this model was put into place in sort of the mid 90s is that we used to have a few more financial institutions were members of the distribution. That has remained fairly stable, but the change has occurred at the commercial cash processing level. So we’ve gone from about a dozen cash processors, you know, slowly down to eight and then four, and then now we’re down to two parties that are doing all of the cash processing on behalf of the members of the distribution system.

Maureen Carroll 00:05:22 One of them is a financial institution owned entity, and one of them is a private company that is also an OCC. So we’ve got now a duopoly essentially or two two main national providers of commercial cash services. So that’s really been the major change for us is that fairly quick reduction in the number of players. And, you know, it’s it’s been fairly orderly up to now. IT institutions are making the best commercial decisions for them in terms of efficiency and and cost of maintaining cash. But where the central bank typically, as you can imagine, thinks about these things is more in terms of risk and resilience. So we fully support having a cash infrastructure that is right sized to the the volume of cash going through the system. But we also have a role to play in ensuring that we can meet our mandate in terms of ensuring cash is accessible. And part of that is making sure that commercial infrastructure is resilient and has an adequate capacity and adequate backup capacity, for example.

Jens Seidl 00:06:28 Absolutely. Well, let’s unpack that a little bit.

Jens Seidl 00:06:31 Maybe you’re saying there’s two main players. How do they service the market equally or have as one focus more, say, on retailers and the other focus more on commercial banks? Or how does that actually work?

Maureen Carroll 00:06:43 They both serve both parties. It’s not a 5050 split, but these are the kind of business where the buyers go out to tender on these services from time to time. So we expect we’ll see fluctuations back and forth as as the buyers select the best option for them. But you know, the the retailers typically it’s really just the very large retailers that contract directly, for example with an ACC for their own specific services. The smaller retailers are going directly through their financial institution.

Jens Seidl 00:07:14 Okay. I see. I see and and they both cover the whole of the country as well, which is a big country, right?

Maureen Carroll 00:07:20 Yeah. Yeah. So not unlike, you know, a country like Australia. We have a very large geography and a very big concentration of population in, in certain regions of the country.

Maureen Carroll 00:07:30 So that is what makes it for all parties, you know, financially difficult to service all areas of the country equally. That said, we have very good coverage of financial services across the country. It’s really the rural, small and remote communities that have a challenge with access to not just cash, but financial services in general. And what we’ve seen Is, you know, innovative ways to to fill that gap, whether it is community associations and community groups coming together to incent a financial institution to stay or some of what we’ve seen anecdotally is communities where they are remote, they’ve lost their last bank. They may still have two, 1 or 2 ATMs in the community that can provide cash, but typically a large retailer in the community will step in and play a role by offering cash back services and ensuring that people have easy access to to cash. So cash back at the point of sale if people are using a debit or credit card is is very common here. So we have had anecdotal reports of essentially the largest retailer in the community ends up becoming a little bit of a de facto cash point for, for for the community.

Jens Seidl 00:08:48 Yeah. Which of course makes sense for them as well. That means they have to repatriate less currency and basically control the stock holding in a more organic way, if you like.

Maureen Carroll 00:08:59 Exactly. Exactly. And they can optimize how they they get services from a cash and transit company.

Jens Seidl 00:09:06 Interesting. We’ve also seen in places like the UK and Australia for instance, where they’ve created these banking hubs under different names, basically offering not just cash services but also banking related services to bank customers in a wide labelled non-branded kind of fashion. Is that also something you’ve observed in in Canada as well?

Maureen Carroll 00:09:25 We don’t have a similar phenomenon in Canada. Typically, you know, when we look at how far people are from an ATM, we do do quantitative measures of distance from from ATMs, and it’s quite reasonable. In urban areas, it’s actually extremely well served. So we haven’t seen any issues with too far of a distance, of course. In remote regions, they may need to drive a little bit further to get to banking services, but we haven’t seen that those types of banking hubs where multiple stakeholders are working together to deliver, where we do have financial institutions presence, they have invested heavily in highly functional ATMs.

Maureen Carroll 00:10:06 So both in urban areas and in rural areas where there are ATMs run by the financial institution, branded ATMs, they have gone to multi denomination cash dispensing, which you know, enables them to provide the denominations people want without having to have the branch open as long hours and which they have without having to have that traffic in the branch. The machines are also used heavily for things like bill payment and other easy transactions that many people would normally do online, but can be at the ATM. So they see those ATMs really as a little bit of dual use. Yes, they dispense cash, but they’re also bill payment. Vehicle and other account management transactions are done there. So they have pushed their customers to those machines and see a long term use case for them. So in that respect, we’re we’re well served on the ATM side.

Jens Seidl 00:11:00 All right. What about deposits? Are they still mostly using deposit machines or recyclers now as well. What’s what’s the trend there.

Maureen Carroll 00:11:06 So deposits go directly into these same ATMs.

Maureen Carroll 00:11:10 So an envelope, cash and checks if we still have a few checks now that. Not that many anymore. We have not seen a vast deployment of recyclers up to now in Canada. So, you know, we expect that at the next refresh cycle, that will definitely be top of mind for the financial institutions of thinking about investing in the recycling aspect of those machines.

Jens Seidl 00:11:32 And maybe if I can come back to the commercial care centers that you mentioned before and how they operate. If I understood you correctly, you offer like a no sell to order scheme or an off balance scheme for Canadian dollars. Okay. Yeah. So for you, for the Bank of Canada, you should really only see those banknotes that are not fit for recirculation anymore and ready to be drawn out of circulation. Is that right?

Maureen Carroll 00:11:55 That’s right.

Jens Seidl 00:11:56 Okay. And how do you cover that? How many centers do you currently have?

Maureen Carroll 00:11:59 So we have two cash centers and like two Bank of Canada run cash centers. And we do all of our processing, high speed processing at those centers to remove unfit notes and to repackage fit notes that can go back into circulation.

Maureen Carroll 00:12:14 So those are two cash centers that have been there since the inception of this. This scheme, like I mentioned in the 90s, and we recently completed a multi-year initiative to refresh and modernize those facilities. So our machines needed updating the software that we manage our inventory with. All of the software that runs our automation was all due for a refresh. So it was a major initiative that was started just pre-pandemic and continued on through the pandemic. We we both replaced equipment and software, but we also needed to do some changes to the facilities themselves, so the facilities had not been touched since they were built. Your normal facility management updates that we took the opportunity to do, but we also needed to reconfigure the space for the new machines and open things up to have a more open workspace with a little bit more automation, to automated packaging of notes and to facilitate a new workflow. So the fact that we went with new machines and new software meant that all of the business processes needed to be rethought and re-engineered. So we and we had the opportunity, to to make sure the space fit was fit for purpose.

Jens Seidl 00:13:32 All right. And there’s this project now completed and delivered everything you wanted it to deliver.

Maureen Carroll 00:13:37 Yeah. It’s completed. It’s you know, for us, the question at the time was, are we really investing money in these cash centres? What’s happening with cash? Isn’t it going away? These are all great questions that you know, are questions that we we faced when we proposed making this investment. And really we we see cash here for the longer term in Canada. As long as there is cash, we will have a role to play. And from a resilience point of view, it’s really important that we as the central bank, maintain a resilient posture with two centres that can operate and back each other up and have equipment and software that we can rely on. And, you know, we know that as things evolve on the commercial side going forward, you know, we may want to think about our role differently. We want to make sure that as a system wide, we have the resilience in place and and we can play a part in that.

Maureen Carroll 00:14:29 So it really for not just for external, but even internally inside the bank, it is a signal that we believe that we have this role to play for the long run, and we need to be prepared to do so.

Jens Seidl 00:14:41 Okay. But maybe before we talk a little bit more about what is happening to cash in Canada, let’s stay with resilience for a little while, because that’s a word we hear everywhere around the world now, especially in countries where cash usage has been declining. I think there is a concern over resilience. It sounds like in Canada you reasonably well positioned well. You’ve got two cash centres with the central bank, so you’ve got some redundancy built into that. You’ve got two big players covering the market. So overall would you say you’re in a reasonably good position right now?

Maureen Carroll 00:15:12 We feel that we are in a reasonably good position, both from our own capability and the network capability. We have two armored car carrier companies in Canada that service the full nation. That said, what we’ve observed in other countries is this can change very quickly.

Maureen Carroll 00:15:29 We know that the ACC business is a difficult one, and we know that maintaining two healthy, ACC providers across such a large country is not is not necessarily a given. So this is something that we monitor closely to make sure that we see any early warning signs. You know, we really want to be mindful. What are the signals that could indicate that there could be a change. What are the market conditions. So it really supports the ongoing research that we have in terms of cash use, cash use, access to cash and acceptance of cash. So it’s something that I think up until recently everybody kind of took for granted. And there’s an expectation that it’s just going to be there when you need it. But of course, it’s a business that people are running out there and it needs to make sense. So while we feel we’re well served and in a good position right now, we know it can change quickly. And that’s part of the reason also why we engage with our peer central banks to understand what they’re seeing.

Maureen Carroll 00:16:28 You know, how they’ve addressed some of the risks or when they’ve seen things change quickly, you know, how did they get prepared to react?

Jens Seidl 00:16:35 Yeah. Well, maybe let’s talk about these three different aspects that you just named there. And starting with use of cash you’ve been monitoring in addition to cash in circulation. Also how cash is actually being used through surveys for quite a while now, right? And what have you seen over the years?

Maureen Carroll 00:16:51 Yeah. So we’ve been doing this for quite a while, and we used to do it on a sort of every three year basis. But since 2020 we’ve been doing our use of cash, our cash volume shares every year. So we’ve gone from about 50% of cash transactions, 50% of point of sale transactions in cash in 2009 to about 20%, down to about 20. So the trajectory has been fairly slow and steady over the years, bottoming out in around 2020. So in 2020, it was about 21% of in-person transactions were done in cash. And that value has quite stable since then up until 2024.

Maureen Carroll 00:17:36 So we’re seeing a little bit of stability. It’s hard to say if that will will stay as is, but for in-person transactions it’s about 20% and that’s been relatively stable.

Jens Seidl 00:17:48 Okay. That’s a number that’s. It’s not uncommon. I think the UK initially saw also the share plateauing around 20% as well. And we’ve seen that in a few other countries. But as you said, you need to continue monitoring trends because it might again move. Right.

Maureen Carroll 00:18:03 Exactly. Exactly. So what we monitor the cash transactions and the rest of the transactions are really fairly evenly split, maybe a little bit more. On the credit card side, we have fairly high credit card use in Canada, but between credit and debit and small percentage mobile and other kinds of payments like prepaid cards. But the bulk is really credit and debit.

Jens Seidl 00:18:26 Yes. Well then the second aspect you you mentioned is access to cash. And I think you also been doing some work on that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Maureen Carroll 00:18:34 Yeah. So when it comes to to access, you know, we have implemented a monitoring system or a monitoring committee for the first time last year to You just create a mechanism to monitor changes that we see.

Maureen Carroll 00:18:48 And and it’s a combination of quantitative data. So the actual geographic distance from ATMs and cash access points and things like media coverage, major media stories about changes in some of the key industry players, sort of at its infancy state. And like I said, the outcome of sort of that first year of monitoring is, you know, very interesting, no alarm bells, but we need a baseline to understand where, where things are going. So we have instituted a little bit more rigor around monitoring the the cash landscape and access to cash. And what we would say today is Canadians have good access to cash. You know, they’re adequately served. And in some areas of the country very well served where there’s a lot of that ATM access points. We also have a lot of white label ATMs across the country. So up to now, Canadian, it has not been a serious pain point. But for the. The occasional rural area that finds themselves with less service.

Jens Seidl 00:19:51 Yes. But even there, I think you mentioned the cashback schemes and similar initiatives.

Jens Seidl 00:19:55 Now, where the market is already trying to create its own solution to fill those gaps.

Maureen Carroll 00:19:59 Right, exactly. And, you know, we have been initiating a lot more outreach on this topic because a lot of the information does come in anecdotally through media reports. So we’re trying to be more systematic about collecting it. But what it has highlighted is that people are pretty innovative. Businesses are innovative in making sure they get what they need. One of the questions that raises for us is that with these new mechanisms, with cash sitting out in the regions, especially remote regions longer, it does have an impact on the quality of notes and circulation. And we’ve moved away since we finished our investment in our cash processing centres. We were now turning our minds to quality. And how do we get a better sense of the real quality of notes and circulation? How can we influence that as the central bank, both from a policy point of view, but from, you know, the quality of notes that we put into circulation as well?

Jens Seidl 00:20:56 And quality, of course, is not just spoilage and things like that, but it’s also counterfeits, right.

Jens Seidl 00:21:01 Have you seen any recent counterfeit trends? Is it stable? Going up, going down. What’s your observation in that space?

Maureen Carroll 00:21:09 Yeah. Well, you know, it really is connected or the the ability for counterfeits to pass really is connected to the quality of those notes in circulation. So we are seeing different trends than we have in recent years. Our level of absolute counterfeiting in terms of counterfeits past is relatively stable. But beneath the surface of of that top line number, we’re seeing a couple of trends. And one, surprisingly, is a high degree of counterfeiting of our lowest denomination, which is the five. And it’s kind of twofold one. banknotes. Dollar notes are being used to harvest the security features to create a higher value counterfeit. The remnants of those notes are being used to create a $5 counterfeit, and that’s something we hadn’t seen in the past. So that $5 counterfeit note has become more prevalent. And of course, being in the lowest denomination, it has amongst the worst quality in circulation in general.

Maureen Carroll 00:22:08 Those are notes that retailers are using for change. They don’t frequently come back to the Bank of Canada. So we’re working with our financial institution partners to make sure that a that they’re aware of the issue and that they become part of our our solution to making sure that notes are as fit as possible out there. So in addition to to these fives that are being harvested for their features, we are seeing a more concerning trend with higher quality counterfeits that are coming in from offshore like a lot of other countries are seeing, and where we’ve been successful on that front is working with new partners, working with our Border Services Agency to provide training, first of all, awareness and then training and a support across the country for identifying these notes as they come in. So we have had a large increase in our seizures of counterfeit notes, which is great news because they haven’t gone into circulation, but also concerning because the number has grown substantially. So, you know, we need to keep vigilant with our border services and our postal services to make sure that they’re aware of what to look for.

Maureen Carroll 00:23:14 If those notes had gone into circulation, we certainly would have seen our parts per million of counterfeits go up.

Jens Seidl 00:23:20 Okay, I see. And what was also interesting to me is I had a call just last week with one of the big retail banks in the Pacific Islands, and they were talking about quality issues related to the polymer substrate that they’re using there. And I don’t understand yet why that is. They’re going to be with us in Bangkok at the currency conference in a few weeks time and hopefully we can find out more about that. But have you seen also quality issues specific to the substrate?

Maureen Carroll 00:23:47 I haven’t, and it will be very interesting to hear from them of what they’re seeing. Specifically, no, we haven’t seen quality issues specifically to the substrate.

Jens Seidl 00:23:58 Yeah, that was news to me as well. So I’m really curious to to learn more about that. Hopefully they’ll bring a few samples and can show us.

Maureen Carroll 00:24:03 Yeah, yeah, the samples always help and understanding, you know, how the notes are used definitely always helps.

Jens Seidl 00:24:09 Absolutely. But maybe looping back to the third aspect that you mentioned and that was acceptance of cash. I guess it’s a lot harder to put quantitative data against. Right. Because it’s not really that well reported I guess.

Maureen Carroll 00:24:20 We don’t get to see a lot of reports like anecdotal reports, but part of our survey methodology and our survey program is to look at merchant acceptance. And so we’ve been doing that since at least 2015. And there has been one big change since the pandemic. Typically on the cash side, cash is widely accepted. So in 2023, 92% of small and medium sized businesses advised us that they have no intention to go cashless. And we’ve got about 96% of small and medium businesses that accept cash has been quite stable. It’s in the high 90s since we’ve been doing our surveys. The change that we’ve seen has been an increase in the percentage of businesses that accept debit and credit, and this is really a function of the pandemic. So in 2018, it was in the mid 60s, mid to high 60s of acceptance of credit and debit.

Maureen Carroll 00:25:18 And now it’s nearing 90%. So very close to the cash. But cash is certainly widely accepted okay.

Jens Seidl 00:25:25 Interestingly you don’t see that any particular segments are being like worst offenders in not wanting to accept cash anymore. Is it just random?

Maureen Carroll 00:25:33 It seems random. I think it’s really part of their business model, whether they’re sort of higher end products or based on, you know, quick service and not wanting to deal with perceived sort of transactions, at least. So it hasn’t really been targeted to one specific. But I will say cash is widely accepted for most things.

Jens Seidl 00:25:53 Okay, good, good. Well that’s encouraging. Well, maybe let’s talk about a little bit what kind of industry innovations are happening at the moment in Canada as well? What are the things that are already making a difference, ideas that have been brought into the market or that you expect to make a difference going forward?

Maureen Carroll 00:26:09 Well, I would say we haven’t seen massive innovations other than the consolidation. And I think the consolidation is really, you know, a function of business opportunity and individual organizations deciding to to kind of go all in on cash.

Maureen Carroll 00:26:24 But when we talk to our stakeholders at various areas, you know, they do come up with ways of optimizing their route, reducing the cost of cash for themselves. And just one small example of talking to a financial Institution that has a lot of small retailers as their customers, and those retailers need change notes. They need coin, they need small notes. So instead of having a labor intensive process at their cash center, they package up pre-built change packages that cost $250, and they get small notes and coins, and they put a barcode on that and sell it as a SKU at their point of sale. And it’s a really quick and easy way for small retailers to get the cash that they need, change notes and coin without much labor at the financial institution. You know, I think their ATM investment is also part of that strategy of how do we automate as much as possible so cash can be deposited. There’s no envelope required. They provide all of those denominations. And what we’ve seen with the Multi-team ATMs is when they came in, they started to try different sets of denominations.

Maureen Carroll 00:27:34 They do change their denomination mix as they get the data on who’s demanding what, what denominations. So it’s great for consumers, it’s great for the financial institution. Made it a little bit more challenging for us to forecast the demand per denomination. So what that has encouraged us to do is to be in more frequent contact, have have more frequent discussions and really get ahead of what some of these changes that they’re thinking about. So trying to establish deeper relationships with the financial institutions on their cash strategy so that we can be better prepared to serve them.

Jens Seidl 00:28:09 Okay, well, that sounds I mean, you said at the beginning when when you explained the role of Bank of Canada, that you’re the wholesale distributor of bank notes and cash, but you also seem to get more and more involved, at least with understanding what’s going on in the retail space, to to be ready for any changes that are coming down the line.

Maureen Carroll 00:28:28 Exactly, exactly. And, you know, if we had our wish list, you know, we would be getting a lot of data from the retail distribution network.

Maureen Carroll 00:28:36 until we get asked a lot internally about for our models for forecasting and use of AI. And, you know, there’s a lot of discussion around new tools available. And where our constraint really is, is less in that the tools that we have available and more into the the level of data that we have available. So, you know, encouraging data sharing where possible, or even doing some pilots to understand what could a deeper data set provide us. That would be things on our wish list to to look at next? Yes.

Jens Seidl 00:29:06 What I’ve also seen in my home country here in Germany is there’s more engagement now between the central bank, the commercial banks, the retailers coming together frequently at roundtables to just talk about what’s, again, what kind of changes are coming, down the road, which I think Germany is, is still at least ten, 15 years, probably behind the trends that you’ve seen in Canada, but probably expect similar developments. So are you doing similar things in Canada?

Maureen Carroll 00:29:34 Yeah, exactly.

Maureen Carroll 00:29:35 I think having closer working relationships, sharing more information, to the extent it’s possible is really, really important. And I think we’ve both heard people talk about cash as a volume business. So when the volumes start to change, you know, the landscape definitely changes. And it does represent an opportunity to be a little bit ahead of the curve and think about, okay, how can we rightsize this? What can we do to make sure that as things change, we’re prepared for it? We’ve got the right infrastructure and the right governance over the whole system. So we’ve been thinking a bit about the governance of the cash system. It really was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the past. And there was a everyone’s incentives were aligned and the volume was there to support it. So as we go forward thinking about how we govern a system that’s changing, that has a public interest, that fulfills the central bank’s mandate, you know, it doesn’t necessarily need to be the central bank that fulfills all of the rules in that Ecosystem, but certainly we need to be prepared to support it.

Maureen Carroll 00:30:37 So we have a vested interest in making sure that all the parties that that do have a voice or have a role to play, understand.

Jens Seidl 00:30:45 Yes. Yeah. And you also mentioned just talking to other colleagues in other parts of the world, right. Because of course, every country is unique in a way. But then there are very similar experiences that some countries are having. So I guess, you know, well, I know that you are part of the Five Nations group, for instance, where you have frequent meetings with those colleagues you are visiting, including some of our conferences as well. So I reckon that’s also a big part of just, again, staying ahead of the game.

Maureen Carroll 00:31:12 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There’s a lot to learn from our peer organisations. And, you know, it is one of the advantages of of working at a central bank. We have this great collaborative set of colleagues across the world, and we can learn from things when they have gone really well, what happened and when things went less well, how did those events unfold? And do we see that coming in our country as well.

Maureen Carroll 00:31:34 You know, when you are talking about these issues with stakeholders that are not as close to it, it’s helpful to have examples of how the cash systems have changed in other countries as well.

Jens Seidl 00:31:47 Absolutely. And I have to say, on a personal note, I’ve only worked closely with central banks over the last eight, ten years or so and really impressed with how factual that engagement is actually happening, regardless of what kind of political trends might be happening on a geopolitical stage. I think the central banks are genuinely interested in making sure that payment systems just work, whether it’s electronic payments, cash payments, that’s really encouraging and refreshing to see. And that’s part of the reason why I really enjoy working in this environment.

Maureen Carroll 00:32:16 Absolutely.

Jens Seidl 00:32:17 Lovely. Well, I think we’re running out of time. So maybe one other thing or one last word that you want to share with our audience.

Maureen Carroll 00:32:25 Well, I guess in terms of our, you know, commitment to cash, we are in the midst of our next generation of polymer notes.

Maureen Carroll 00:32:33 So we will be issuing the next note, which is the new $20 Canadian note with King Charles in the coming years and probably early 2027. So we look forward to to issuing a new note. It’s always an exciting time, and that the one after that will be our $5 note. So we’ve got an active note development program in place as well, which is always engaging, not just internally, but when we launch a new note, it also generates a lot of interest and excitement. So there’s still new node development happening and new notes to issue in in the future.

Jens Seidl 00:33:06 Excellent. And while our listeners cannot see that, but you’ve got a lovely background there behind you as well with the hockey players, on which denomination is that of the Canadian dollar?

Maureen Carroll 00:33:14 This is the $5 note from the Canadian Journal series featuring, yeah, kids playing hockey. So you can’t really get much more Canadian than that. And we have a number of Canadian teams in the NHL playoffs that have just started. So we’re in the midst of like a great hockey playoff season here in Canada.

Jens Seidl 00:33:33 Excellent. Well, as I learned recently elbow.

Maureen Carroll 00:33:36 Up about that. Yes. That is a term that hath, you know, popped out of the hockey world lately. But it’s always a time of year. It’s it’s shocking that it goes right till June. And hopefully some of the Canadian teams are in it right till the end. But we’ve got great representation in the playoffs.

Jens Seidl 00:33:51 Sounds great. Excellent. Well we’re out of time. Alright. It was so great to have you with us. Thank you very much for joining us.

Maureen Carroll 00:33:57 Thank you. Yeah, it’s great to, great to chat with you as always.

Jens Seidl 00:34:00 All right. Well, thank you all very much for listening in to this episode. Do your usual thing follow, like to make sure that you don’t miss any future episodes. And feel free to catch up on our back catalogue. This is the insider from Currency Research. Signing off. Thank you.