Banks need to take responsibility for their corporate customers' daily takings and petty cash
News 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. This is the opinion of the Riksbank in a written communication sent today to the inquiry on cash at the Ministry of Finance.
Banks have largely stopped providing cash services to businesses. Functional services for daily takings and petty cash are currently offered almost exclusively by the cash-in-transit company Loomis AB and entirely on a commercial basis. In the Riksbank's opinion, banks need to take greater responsibility to ensure long-term access to services.
There is already a legal requirement for some banks to ensure that companies and public authorities can deposit daily takings to an adequate extent. According to the Riksbank, the legal requirement needs to be tightened and clarified as the services offered by the banks are inadequate. Banks have chosen to fulfil these requirements by providing deposit machines with limits that are too low for many businesses. The Riksbank would also like to see urgent measures to ensure access to petty cash. This service has deteriorated significantly as more and more banks have closed their manual cash services.
“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. Many businesses continue to accept cash, but without these services they would not be able to do so in practice. In addition, 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," says Christina Wejshammar, Head of the Payments Department at the Riksbank.
The written communication is a submission from the Riksbank's Payments Department to the inquiry into the possibilities for paying with cash and access to cash (Fi2024/0068), which is led by Member of Parliament Dennis Dioukarev on behalf of the Ministry of Finance. The inquiry is to present its final report by 31 December.