Governor State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Yaseen Anwar has said the main goal of security printing for the central bank is to prevent forgery, tampering, and counterfeiting of banknotes.
“We must stay ahead of counterfeiters and protect the integrity of our currency,” he said while inaugurating the Upgraded Security Inks Manufacturing Facility of SICPA (Société Industrielle at Commerciale de Produits Agricoles), Pakistan here Thursday.
SBP governor observed the soundness of a nation’s currency was essential to the soundness of its economy.
“As the nation’s central bank, SBP has a wide range of responsibilities relating to banknotes, from ensuring an adequate supply to protecting and maintaining confidence in the currency. Together with our partners at Pakistan Security Printing Corporation (PSPC) and the law enforcement agencies, we continuously monitor the counterfeiting threats for each denomination, and make re-design decisions based on these threats,” he added.
Anwar said gaining and maintaining public confidence in the currency was a key role for any central bank. “Undoubtedly, one of the major challenges facing a central bank in ensuring public confidence in its currency is the rise of counterfeit banknotes,” he added.
He said advanced security features involving ink play a very important role in defeating the endeavors of counterfeiters, thereby curbing circulation of fake currency. “Increasingly, as counterfeiters become more sophisticated, the central banks admit that they need to push security printing for new technologies and new substrates,” he said.
“To help prevent counterfeiting, SICPA’s security ink technology plays a vital role in making our banknotes difficult to counterfeit through state-of-the-art security features such as Optical Variable Ink (OVI) design, infra-red ink designs, UV fluorescent ink, and SICPA TALK ink images,” he said.
He observed it must be ensured that ink based security features stay and do not fade away early in the life of a banknote before it is taken out of circulation. “In the fast-paced environment that we live in, people need to rely instinctively on their senses of sight and touch to authenticate a banknote in a fraction of a second,” he added.
Anwar said the intaglio security feature on banknotes was preferred by the general public in Pakistan because one could instinctively feel the raised surface by just touching the banknote. Another most commonly understood security feature on our banknotes of Rs500, Rs1,000 and Rs5,000 denominations was the Optical Variable Ink (OVI) with which one could immediately detect the genuineness of the banknote by tilting the note, he said.
“I am sure PSPC and SICPA must be working to improve the longevity of these ink based security features, especially in light of our climatic conditions and usages by the general public, so that machine readability of these security features remains intact.”
The governor said all our new design banknotes had machine readable features that were useful for processing and detection of counterfeiting through note processing machines and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs).
