Sweden’s Central Bank Calls for Stronger Pro-cash Laws
Sep 20, 2024
Sveriges Riksbank—Sweden’s Central Bank—has called for clarification and tightening of the legal requirements around banks supplying cash services, describing those currently on offer as ‘inadequate’.
Earlier this year, Sveriges Riksbank recommended legislation around the right to pay in cash and banks—including itself—taking a more active role in ensuring good provision of cash and related services. It recently followed this up with advice to the Ministry of Finance around strengthening these services, especially for business use, in response to the ministry’s inquiry on cash.
Regulation is needed to ensure that operators, who are legally obliged to accept cash, have access to functioning services for daily takings and petty cash.
While legislation exists requiring some banks to ensure public authorities and companies are able to make daily deposits, the Riksbank says it must be tightened as many banks have opted to fulfil the requirement by providing deposit machines ‘with limits that are too low for many businesses’.
Christina Wejshammar, Head of the Payments Department at the Riksbank, reinforced previous statements around the importance of cash to a fair and resilient nation, noting improvement to the current system is needed to ensure people can pay in cash—whether through need, personal choice or as a backup when cashless payments fail—and supporting services are available to all businesses.
The measures we propose in our written communication are necessary to enable people who need to use cash to do so, but also to strengthen our civil preparedness regarding payments… If there are new obligations to accept cash for operators selling essential goods, services for daily takings and petty cash will have to be maintained throughout the country. In this way, the banks contribute to a cash chain that functions under normal conditions, and thus also in crisis situations.