A major impact of the pandemic financial services providers continue to deal with is a shortage of coins, CUNA Senior Director of Advocacy for Payments and Cybersecurity Lance Noggle and Joan Baldi of SAFE CU, Folsom, Calif., told Bankrate recently for an article documenting the latest on the shortage.

Noggle, who represents CUNA on the U.S. Coin Task Force, says “it’s gotten better but how much better,” in a recent interview.

“We don’t know if there will be an outbreak where people don’t want to leave their homes. A lot of it depends on the crisis itself—whether there is another outbreak and how that impacts peoples’ behavior going into businesses.”

JBaldi, assistant vice president and controller of SAFE CU, described getting a memo from the Federal Reserve that coin orders may be limited in the future.

Describing the situation as the financial equivalent of a toilet paper shortage, Baldi did not want to leave member unable to get coins, so she ordered coins for all branch locations and stored them safety in a third-party vault.

The U.S. Coin Task Force was established this month by the Federal Reserve with industry leaders to help reduce the impact of the pandemic on coin circulation.

It urges the American public to:

• Spend their coin;
• Deposit coin at financial institutions;
• Redeem coin at coin kiosks; and
• Use the hashtag #getcoinmoving in social media posts to promote awareness and understanding of this issue