In 2018 the number of payments with cards with a debit function issued by resident payment service providers increased by more than 19% to just under 4 billion transactions. The latest figures of the Statistics on Payments and Securities Trading, Clearing and Settlement can be found here:

In a study prepared together with Professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University Linz, illegal demand for cash in Germany is investigated. The study presents an overview of economic research on the use of cash in the shadow economy as well as fresh empirical analyses by the authors. They look at the influence of the shadow economy on cash lodgements at Bundesbank branches and the demand for banknotes in Germany.

The July 2019 edition of the Bundesbank’s Monthly Report describes co-movements between the exchange rates of major currencies and addresses the topic of crypto tokens in payments and securities settlement.

The G7 finance ministers and central bank governors at the G7 meeting near Paris.

The consolidation process in the German banking sector continued in 2018. The total number of credit institutions in Germany has fallen by 40 to 1,783 institutions.

The global financial crisis was a lesson that it is not enough to merely monitor the stability of individual banks – the stability of the banking sector as a whole is also a crucial factor, which is precisely what the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB), a key instrument under the Basel III regime, is there to help safeguard. However, recent research indicates that adhering too strictly to the reference indicator envisaged under the Basel III framework might lead to a situation in which supervisors activate the CCyB either too late or not at all ahead of a future financial crisis.