Latvia's central bank: households should keep a week's worth of cash on hand
After a recent storm disrupted hundreds of ATMs, the Bank of Latvia has renewed its call for residents to keep cash reserves for emergencies. During the storm, 183 of the country's 869 ATMs were affected, including 17 classified as critical.
A recent storm in Latvia once again highlighted the importance of cash during emergencies, prompting the Bank of Latvia to renew its call for residents to build up cash reserves for crisis situations. The central bank shared the assessment with the news portal Delfi.
The bank recommends keeping such reserves in small denominations to make cash payments easier. It has not set a specific target amount, since needs vary between households, but suggests the reserve should be enough to cover roughly one week of expenses.
Storm's impact on ATMs
Out of 869 ATMs nationwide, 183 experienced some level of disruption during the storm. Among them were 17 so-called critical ATMs — machines banks are required to prioritize keeping operational during a crisis. Problems were concentrated at ATMs located inside shopping centers that stayed closed due to power outages, making them inaccessible to both cash-in-transit companies and the public. ATMs in publicly accessible locations within regions affected by power outages mostly continued to function.
Offline payments and lessons learned
Over the weekend, some stores using electricity generators kept offline card payments running, a function activated by entering a PIN at the payment terminal. However, this only works if the store itself has power. After the storm, stores that opened on Sunday mostly processed payments normally rather than relying on offline mode.
The Bank of Latvia concluded that the storm served as a useful test of banks' readiness to operate when power, communications, or other infrastructure is disrupted. Lessons learned will be applied in cooperation with the Crisis Management Center, the Ministry of Finance and commercial banks to improve service availability going forward.
Currently, four banks with the largest deposit shares are required to guarantee critical financial services: Swedbank, SEB, Citadele and Luminor. The central bank has previously proposed a solution for cases where a shopping center housing a critical ATM cannot open during a crisis — setting up designated resilience points at individual stores that also host such ATMs.
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