Organization/s that “owns” (developed, implemented, etc) the program/project.
List all organizations involved in the development of this project
The FNCRF brings together the entire French cash ecosystem under the coordination of the Banque de France.
Participants include commercial banks, cash-in-transit companies (notably Loomis and Brink’s), government authorities (Direction Générale du Trésor, Ministry of the Interior, SHFDS), retailers’ federations, and local authorities.
This multi-stakeholder structure enables real-time coordination across public and private actors responsible for cash issuance, logistics, distribution, security, and end-user access.
The framework operates both preventively (exercises, preparedness, planning) and operationally during real crises, ensuring continuity of cash distribution and public confidence in all circumstances.
Date the Program was Implemented/Released
Project/Program Description
The FNCRF was formalised during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.
The pandemic revealed structural vulnerabilities in the cash cycle under extreme stress conditions: reduced workforce availability, mobility restrictions, logistical bottlenecks, and heightened uncertainty regarding public cash demand. Maintaining nationwide access to cash required unprecedented coordination between the Banque de France, commercial banks, cash-in-transit companies and public authorities.
This crisis demonstrated the limits of ad hoc coordination and highlighted the need for a permanent, structured crisis governance mechanism. It also showed that operational resilience depended not only on stock levels and liquidity, but on anticipation, information sharing and collective decision-making.
Building on these lessons, the Banque de France institutionalised the FNCRF as a lasting governance body, continuously strengthened since 2020 to address evolving risks including climate-related events, social unrest, cybersecurity threats and geopolitical instability.
Country/Countries of Implementation:
France (nationwide, including mainland and overseas territories).
Impact of the Program
The impact of the FNCRF is assessed through operational indicators such as ATM availability rates, absence of prolonged cash shortages, continuity of commercial bank servicing, and structured stakeholder feedback following crisis activations.
Concrete examples demonstrate both reactive and preventive effectiveness:
- Rapid restoration of cash distribution in Mayotte following the devastating cyclone of 2024, which severely disrupted electricity, telecommunications and logistics infrastructure. The FNCRF coordinated emergency cash shipments, secured transport conditions and progressive reinstatement of ATM services, ensuring continued access to cash for the affected population.
- Successful management of the prolonged strike affecting Loomis (2024–2025), one of the major cash-in-transit companies in France. Through coordinated redistribution of logistics flows, prioritisation of critical areas and mobilisation of alternative servicing solutions, nationwide cash availability was maintained without systemic disruption.
- Preventive measures implemented during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Anticipating exceptional demand and heightened security constraints, reinforced stock positioning, enhanced coordination with public authorities and real-time monitoring mechanisms ensured seamless cash availability throughout the event.
- Full continuity of cash orders during a live two-day IT outage simulation in November 2025 and validated crisis-readiness during HYDROS 25, a large-scale flood simulation affecting over one million people.
Together, these events confirm the measurable and operational contribution of the FNCRF to national cash resilience.
The scope of User Benefit
The program benefits the entire French population who rely on cash for daily payments, ensuring uninterrupted access to a secure and widely accepted means of payment under all circumstances. It is particularly critical for vulnerable and unbanked individuals, for whom cash remains an essential tool for financial inclusion and budget management. Retailers and merchants also depend on the reliability of cash distribution to guarantee business continuity and consumer confidence. At the same time, banks and cash-in-transit companies benefit from a structured coordination framework that enhances operational stability and crisis responsiveness. More broadly, public authorities rely on this system to safeguard economic continuity and social cohesion, especially during periods of disruption when maintaining trust in payment systems becomes a matter of national stability.
Sustainability/Replicability of the program
The FNCRF is a permanent and institutionalised framework, fully embedded within France’s national crisis management and cash governance structures. It is not an ad-hoc mechanism created in response to a single event, but a long-term operational capability designed to evolve over time. While it is not established under a specific legal framework, it operates on the basis of structured governance arrangements, formalised cooperation between stakeholders and well-defined operational procedures, ensuring both flexibility and effectiveness.
Its sustainability is ensured through continuous use and reinforcement. The framework is regularly activated during real crises as well as through large-scale simulation exercises, enabling the Banque de France and all cash cycle stakeholders to maintain a high level of readiness. Each activation leads to structured feedback and progressive refinement of procedures, tools and coordination mechanisms.
Beyond national resilience, the FNCRF has been conceived as a transferable model. It is built on fundamental principles applicable to any jurisdiction seeking to safeguard access to cash: strong leadership by the issuing authority, trusted public-private cooperation, realistic stress testing and scalable operational responses.
The Banque de France actively shares its experience and operational practices with foreign central banks through bilateral cooperation and international forums, contributing to the strengthening of global cash cycle resilience.
Ingenuity of the Program
The originality of the FNCRF is that it industrialises cash resilience as a permanent capability, rather than treating it as an ad-hoc emergency reaction. It does so by combining governance, operational playbooks, scenario testing and feedback loops across the entire cash value chain (issuance → logistics → distribution → acceptance), in both mainland France and overseas territories.
1) A “place-based” governance architecture that turns fragmentation into alignment
FNCRF builds on a standing coordination mechanism chaired by the central bank, designed to orchestrate decisions across independent actors (banks, retailers, cash-logistics firms, authorities) when time-critical trade-offs arise (route security, prioritisation of zones, degraded operations, etc.). This creates a single, trusted escalation channel that reduces coordination latency and contradictory instructions in crisis conditions.
2) Resilience by design: structured preparedness + proportional activation
Instead of improvisation, FNCRF relies on a predefined catalogue of mitigation options that can be activated proportionally to scenario severity. This includes (illustratively): contingency stocks, logistics re-routing, prioritisation rules (areas/ATMs/critical services), degraded IT/manual procedures, and facilitated access/security measures with public authorities. The value is not only the tools themselves, but the fact that actors are pre-aligned on “what can be done, by whom, and how fast.”
3) Continuous learning loop: exercises → crisis management → after-action improvements
FNCRF embeds “learning in motion” through live simulations and structured feedback: stress tests, multi-actor exercises, and after-action reviews that update procedures, contact chains and prioritisation logic. HYDROS 25 is a good example of large-scale crisis rehearsal dynamics with state services and strategic sectors, validating coordination reflexes, continuity procedures, and communication under extreme constraints.
4) End-to-end resilience, not only logistics: operational + technological + societal layers
FNCRF explicitly addresses the reality that “cash continuity” is multi-dimensional:
- Operational: forecasting, replenishment cadence, cash centre capacity, staffing constraints.
- Logistical: route availability, access restrictions, fuel, secure transport.
- Technological: degraded modes when telecom/IT are disrupted; manual fallbacks and reconciliation.
- Societal: cash acceptance and the public’s ability to withdraw and use cash, which CNMP communications repeatedly frame as a component of national resilience.
5) Overseas integration as a differentiator (not a footnote)
A core ingenuity point is that the framework is not “metropolitan-only”: it explicitly integrates overseas continuity through the issuing and cash-services role of IEDOM and the reality of infrastructure fragility during extreme events—illustrated by Mayotte, where the resumption of cash supply required staged restart of operations and progressive ATM replenishment.
Scope of Collaboration
FNCRF represents a high-density, whole-ecosystem collaboration—not merely a banking coordination group. It operates as a standing platform that connects the full cash cycle, enabling rapid collective decision-making and coherent crisis communication.
Core stakeholders involved (end-to-end cash cycle):
- Issuing authority / central bank (governance, wholesale issuance, system coordination).
- Commercial banks (ATM and branch access, demand forecasting, customer continuity).
- Cash-in-transit and cash processing operators (transport, cash centres, replenishment execution).
- Retailers & merchant networks (acceptance, deposits/cash-in-shop dynamics, local continuity).
- Public authorities (security, access authorisations, route protection, crisis facilitation).
- Overseas issuing & cash services (IEDOM) (local execution, liaison, adaptation to local constraints).
What makes the collaboration “comprehensive” (and not symbolic):
- Permanent coordination rather than ad-hoc crisis meetings: a ready structure that can shift from monitoring to activation without rebuilding governance on the fly.
- Cross-ministry & security integration: the platform explicitly includes government actors relevant to permissions, protection and emergency facilitation—an essential differentiator for cash logistics under disrupted conditions.
- Operational executability: decisions are paired with actors who can execute (CIT + banks + authorities), and with communication channels that avoid mixed messages and ensure proportional activation of tools.
- Coverage of both access and acceptance: not only “can people withdraw?”, but also “can cash be used and deposited?”—which is central to maintaining cash as a functioning payment instrument in stressed environments.
