The currency community will be saddened to hear of the death of Adrian Baxter, after a long and hard-fought battle against cancer.

He had been involved in the commercial cash environment since the early 1980s, starting off with Recognition Equipment as a technician. He then joined  Electronic Designs as Technical Director, servicing financial centres in South Africa, before joining the cash sorting business Currency Systems International (CSI) in 1994, where he was involved in setting up and supporting multiple cash centers in the UK and Asia. He relocated to Dallas following the sale of CSI to De La Rue in 2001 as Senior Sales Director, and joined Currency Research four years later as President and CEO.

Currency Research organizes the Currency Conference and ICCOS seminars, and it was in his capacity as head of both that he is best known, along with his position as Executive Director of IACA, where he was assisted by his wife Sybil. In addition to building up the Currency Conference, Adrian also refocused ICCOS – previously a US-centric event held every 18 months - into three separate regional events, each of which has become extremely successful in its own right.

Adrian also played a key role in the development of Currency News as a Board member, source of advice and regular contributor, and
was instrumental in creating the Coin Conference.

In all these different roles, Adrian helped lead the way in bringing together the different stakeholders in currency – opening up the community to dialogue and communication and to promoting the use of cash. As a result, he was an extremely well-known and popular figure, renowned for his knowledge of the industry, his boundless energy and enthusiasm, and above all, his enormous sense of humour – the latter never leaving him. Indeed, and typically, even as he battled his illness, he was determined to carry on, and continued managing on a 'business-as-usual' basis almost to the very end.

In the words of Richard Haycock, Currency Research Chairman and long-time friend and business colleague, 'he will be greatly missed by Currency Research, IACA , and the currency community'.