This year the Technical Forum celebrated its 20th Anniversary at the World Money Fair, with some 280 people attending either in person or online. A total of fifteen papers were presented, with this month’s review continuing on from the March issue and covering the middle third of these presentations.

Belgian businesses and shopkeepers will soon be obliged to accept cash payments following the Federal Government’s approval of legislation around cash acceptance. This follows a rise in the number of establishments that do not accept cash and subsequent complaints about the issue.

Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting is rapidly becoming a normal part of organisational life. In this context the Mint Directors Association (MDA) organised a webinar on 13 March to hear from three practitioners about their experience in this area.

The World Money Fair Technical Forum celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, just two years after the main event commemorated its half-centennial, having been established in 1972. In this month’s issue of Coin & Mint News™, we review the first five papers from the Technical Forum, with subsequent issues to cover the remainder.

Three of France’s circulating coins are being updated to honour three exceptional French women. The updates to these coins follows those made in 2022 to the €1 and €2 coins, and marks the first time that the national sides of the coins have been updated since France’s adoption of the euro as its currency.

The Casa da Moeda do Brasil celebrated its 330th anniversary earlier this month with the launch of a commemorative medal featuring augmented reality (AR) technology. The medal is available in either bronze or silver and features invisible ink in addition to the AR technology.

The Perth Mint has announced two new partnerships during the month of March, with the first relating to the Mint Directors Association (MDA), and the second to numismatic platform Coiniverse.

The Central Bank of Kosovo has released details of its efforts to fight counterfeit currency, noting that it had successfully coordinated inter-institutional meetings to design and implement effective strategies to combat the circulation of counterfeit coins, especially €2 coins.

The People’s Bank of China has issued a series of commemorative coins to celebrate 2024’s Lunar Year of the Long (Chinese Dragon), which began on 10 February. Comprised of one gold coin, one silver coin, and one bi-metallic copper alloy coin, the set is all legal tender.

In its recently published Annual Report for the 2023 fiscal year, the United States Mint reported a 12.1% fall in revenue to $4.68 billion. In volume terms, the Mint shipped 10.5 billion circulation coins to the Federal Reserve Bank compared with 12.1 billion in 2022, a decrease of 1.6 billion coins (-13.2%).

Many societies have a long-standing tradition of gifting money (banknotes and coins) to mark auspicious occasions – births and birthdays, weddings and other special events, where the value of the gift is as much social as it is financial.

Swiss-based Numisstaxx has launched as a new platform for the digitisation of coin collecting, providing users with the ability to digitalise and share coins easily online.

The Paris 2024 Organising Committee has unveiled the medals for the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Monnaie de Paris has been charged with production of the medals, exactly a century after the previous Parisian Games in 1924.

The central bank of Estonia, Eesti Pank, ended last year with an announcement that its Omniva coin collection campaign would continue into 2024. Although the programme had only been running for three months (as of December 2023), it had already collected around 3.3 million coins – 65% of which were 1 and 2 cent coins.

The Royal Canadian Mint has released several coins in varying designs and denominations to commemorate the Year of the Dragon. Amongst these are a 1kg gold coin with an extremely limited mintage and a pair of silver and gold coins featuring Extraordinarily High Relief.

Held last October during the Gala Dinner at MDC 2023 in Ottawa, Canada, the MDC Awards paid tribute to a sometimes-underrepresented part of coin design when it comes to awards, namely ‘Best Packaging (of a collectible coin)’.

The Mint Directors Association’s Sustainability Group has announced a webinar focusing on ‘ESG Reporting – Insights from Within the Industry’, scheduled to be held on Wednesday 13 March at 10:00 and 16:00 GMT.

The Royal Mint has partnered with the United States Mint in ‘a groundbreaking collaboration’ between the Chief Engravers of both mints to produce a design for the 2024 Britannia and Liberty commemorative coins.

The Mint of Poland has opened this year with the release of the ‘world’s first flying coin’. Unveiled at the recent World Money Fair Technical Forum in Berlin, it floats in the air via a motor hidden inside the coin itself.

The Royal Dutch Mint has launched its latest ‘good-cause’ coin issue, in collaboration with the Dutch Hartstichting (Heart) Foundation.