Following three years of economic struggle and several bailouts totally nearly $800 billion, Greece could reinstitute its old currency should they pull out of the Eurozone.

Hartmut Grossman, an analyst at ICS Risk Advisors, said these plans have been in place since Greece’s first major debt crisis in 2009.

“A lot of the firms, particularly in Europe and also here, have been looking at that for a long time,” he told Reuters. “But there really has been contingency planning at all of the financial institutions for that to happen … Greece leaving the euro zone is not a new idea.”

For their part, the European Union said it wanted Greece to stick with the euro, a multi-country common currency.

According to an article written for the Associated Press by David McHugh, the “great fear” is that if Greece leaves the euro, other troubled Eurozone countries may follow suit.

If the country does return to the drachma, however, it is not a process that can take place over night.

Before banknotes can be processed, they have to be designed, developed and equipped with security features to prevent counterfeiting. These elements must be assembled before being shipped to the paper maker, which can take three to four months. After that, the notes are sent to the security printer who must undergo at least six to eight different processes to get the notes ready for circulation.

Even in the case of a crisis, the minimum time frame to introduce new banknotes into circulation is close to a year.

SOURCES:
Reuters: “Banks Prepare For The Return Of The Drachma”
The Chronicle Herald: “Greece’s Exit From Eurozone On The Table”
The Globe and mail: “Can Printing New Currencies Keep Euro Zone United?”

There are nine distinctive features on the new $20 bill:

- Raised Ink: This feature appears on the large number that depicts the denomination (in the case a “20” on the left side of the bill), on the shoulder of the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and also on the words “Bank Of Canada/Banque du Canada” which appear near the transparent window.

- Transparent Window: Like the $100 and $50 bills, a large transparent window is present on the right side of the bill. The window contains a metallic portrait of both the Queen and of a building.

- Metallic Portrait: The metallic portrait featured in the transparent window identically matches the large portrait seen on the left side of the bill.

- Metallic Building: The clock tower building in the transparent window changes colour when the note is titled.

- Small Numbers: A series of small numbers also appears in the transparent window. These numbers correspond to the value of the note and some of them appear in reverse.

- Transparent Text: Also in the transparent window, see-through lettering of the word “Canada” is visible and feels slightly raised.

- Maple Leaf Border: A series of maple leafs surrounding the right side of the transparent window also cross over into the clear part, noting visible changes in the design.

- Frosted Maple Leaf Window: A frosted maple leaf appears on the left side of the note and is surrounded by a transparent outline.

- Hidden Numbers: A series of small numbers that match the bill’s denomination appear within the frosted window. These numbers can only be seen by using a small light like an incandescent bulb or a pot light.

The $20 denomination is the most circulated bill in Canada, and will be introduced into circulation later this year. The last two notes in the series – the $10 and $5 bills – will be released before the end of 2013.

SOURCE:
Bank of Canada: “Polymer Series – Security”

The new notes will span all the denominations – 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 & 1,000 kronor – and the design will feature famous Swedes such as film director Ingmar Bergman, children’s author Astrid Lindgren, former United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, opera singer Birgit Nilsson, film star Greta Garbo, and musician Evert Taube.

The new series was designed by Göran Österlund, whose colourful “Journey of Culture” (Kulturresan) design was selected from among eight finalists in a contest launched by Sweden’s national bank last year.

“It’s been a difficult but stimulating task to pick a winner. All the contestants submitted ambitious and well worked suggestions, but in the end we were captivated by ‘The Cultural Journey’,” said Peter Egardt, a member of the Riksbank board of directors and chair of the banknote design selection jury, in a statement. “The overall impression is a beautiful and user-friendly series of bills which are built on a well-weighed balance between something new and Swedish banknote tradition.”

Österlund said his winning design as was meant to “let the bills take us on a journey from the Öresund Bridge in the south to the Treriksröset in the north,” referencing the “Three Country Cairn” where the borders of Finland, Sweden, and Norway meet, reported The Local.

The new faces won’t be the only adjustment to the banknotes, however. All of the new notes will be equipped with a new security feature known as “Spark” – a device that allows the banknote’s colour to shift when tilted and includes magnetic pigments in the dye that creates an image in certain light.

Higher denominations (100, 200, 500 & 1,000) will have an addition feature called “Motion” which is a window thread embedded into the banknote paper, giving an impression of movement when the banknote is titled. This feature currently exists on the most recent version of the 1,000-krona banknote.

The new series of banknotes will be introduced into circulation in 2015.

SOURCES:
The Local: “Sweden Shows Off Garbo, Bergman Banknotes”
Sveriges Riksbank: “Questions and Answers – New Banknote and Coin Series”

QR codes – also known as Quick Response codes – play the role of an enhanced barcode. The pattern consists of black modules (square dots) arranged in a square pattern on a white background. This unique pattern (different for all QR codes) is a gateway to information that is stored online and can be accessed using mobile phones.

The codes printed on the limited edition coins issued last year, for example, would direct people to a mobile website where they could find information on the Royal Dutch Mint and learn how the coins were made.

After a competition held to redesign their currency, Sweden will be the first to introduce the first banknotes with QR codes.

“The competition came to an end late last year with artist and engraver Goran Osterlund winning the privilege to fashion the codes for the new banknotes,” an article in QR Code Press reported. “Osterlund will design the new banknotes and determine the placement of two QR codes that will be featured on the currency. The codes are meant to direct people to the Svergis Riksbank website where they can find a wealth of information concerning the organization, its history, and the services it offers to Swedish citizens.”

Though the Swedish bank had hoped to introduce the banknotes by 2015, officials at Svergis Riksbank have said they have to first increase security on the codes after seeing examples of codes linking to malicious content. The bank also expressed concerns over the potential of accessing a users’ personal information when the code is scanned.

“As such,” QR Code Press said, “Svergis Riksbank is working to make their QR codes more secure.”

SOURCES:
QR Code Press: “Sweden To Adopt QR Coded Banknotes”
2D Code: “QR Code Banknotes”
“QR Code”

The bills feature new anti-counterfeiting devices such as transparent windows that are proving to be incompatible the existing ATMs. Rashid Al Fandi, executive director of banking operations and payment systems, expressed his frustration over the situation this week.

“When we launched the new, amended Dh500 (US$136.12) notes we informed all the banks to reprogram their machines,” he told The National. “It seems there was a delay in reprogramming the deposit-taking machines. This was what we asked the banks – so why the delay?”

Though consumers can still deposit the new banknotes to their accounts via bank tellers, the Central Bank said they had established timelines for companies to complete upgrades to the machines in order to avoid such a situation.

The Central Bank’s annoyance was compounded by the fact that other devices that took the Dh500 notes, such as counting machines, were reprogrammed within three days, wrote The National.

However, Sherif El Shafie, the regional managing director at NCR Corporation, a US maker of ATMs, barcode scanners and self-service kiosks and one of the biggest vendors of ATMs in the UAE, said the upgrades proved to be more complex than previously imagined.

“There is a sophisticated process for certifying any new banknote release to ensure that the technology identifies and recognizes genuine notes,” Shafie said. “This process takes some time to ensure accuracy.”

Shafie also said that the problem only resides in deposits and expects the issue to be fixed “within a matter of days.” Currently ATMs across the UAE are equipped to dispense the new Dh500 bills.

SOURCE:
The National: “New Banknotes Hard To Counterfeit And Deposit”

Available June 1, the £100 banknote is a special edition note that marks the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

In order to manufacture the note, a law dating back to 1959 that limited the maximum denomination of any currency note to £50 had to be amended.

“This is an appropriate way for Jersey to celebrate its loyalty to the crown,” said Senator Philip Ozouf, the Treasury Minister of the States of Jersey.

The note will feature English, French and Jèrriais words and the holographic portrait will appear as the main image and on the security strip.

In 2010, Jersey introduced a brand new series of banknotes that highlighted the region’s unique attributes.

Complete with images that chronicled key moments in the island’s history and phrases written in the native Jèrriais – a distinctive brand of French – the banknotes were the first new series Jersey has introduced in over twenty years.

Like many new banknotes, the Jersey series was also equipped with new security features to deter counterfeiting. A hologram on the top left corner of the notes was one of the new features added to the series as well as a see through map of the state. Familiar features such as a watermark and a silver security thread that appeared on old banknotes returned to the series as well.

The bailiwick of Jersey is part of the Channel Islands, located between England and France.

SOURCES:
BBC News: “Jersey Hologram £100 Banknotes Released.”
Banknote News: “Jersey Issues New Note Family”

Called “MintChip” the proposed system would be a virtual payment method accessible through microchips, microSD cards and USB sticks.

“The easiest way to describe it is that it’s a small chip like you would find in your phone,” said Christine Aquino, the mint’s director of communications.

“Imagine a whole new breed of transactions that are smaller, faster and virtually everywhere. That’s where MintChip comes in – Using a chip, you securely load value onto a smart phone, USB device, computer, tablet or cloud – or maybe even some future device that doesn’t exist yet,” a promotional video released by the mint described.

No personal information would be required to use the system and only small-value transactions (anything under $10) could be used.

Though the conception has been developed, the software has not. That’s why the mint is offering $50,000 for winners of a contest aimed at developing smartphone apps and other ways of demonstrating MintChip’s benefits as a payment system for consumers, an article in the Leader-Post reported.

The winners will be chosen by a panel of business leaders including mint CEO Ian Bennett and Google’s vice-president of payments, Osama Bedler in September.

According to the Leader-Post, Marc Brule, the mint’s chief financial officer, will disclose more details about MintChip at an upcoming speech in Toronto later this month during a Forum on “Canadian Payment Innovations” sponsored by the The Canadian Institute business think tank.

SOURCES:
The Leader-Post: “Mint Promotes Digital-Chip Currency”

In the world of specialty paper, RFID tags or chips are typically associated with electronic passports. Containing a carrier’s biometric information, the RFID chips facilitate faster and more secure passage at border crossings.

Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) say banknotes outfitted with RFID tags represent the next wave in secure banknote technology.

“Current anti-counterfeiting measures are limited to features like holograms, fluorescent inks, special threads, watermarks, raised printing, etc,” says lead researcher Husam Alshareef. “But most of these features can be replicated. The next generation of security features has to have some sort of electronic circuitry such as RFID tags.”

The biggest challenge for Alshareef and his team was figuring out how to incorporate the solid RFIDs into the flexible surface of a banknote.

To solve this problem, the KAUST research team created an RFID tag based on ferroelectric organic polymers, which possess high polarization that is reversed when an external field is applied to create the on/off switch. Both tags were built up on a smooth layer of polydimethylsiloxane that covers the rough banknote surface and absorbs bending movements to protect the RFID layers above from strain, according an article published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

Alshareef says despite these advancements, a major challenge remains that “RFIDs cannot be incorporated into the ink used to print banknotes because the devices need to be patterned and produced individually.”

George Whitesides, a researcher who works on paper-based microfluid devices at Harvard University, says the physical wear and tear on paper indeed makes a project like this difficult but is confident the outcomes could prove to be a step in the right direction for banknote security.

‘The development of a new method of putting ferromagnetic elements on paper is certainly interesting and has the potential to be used in a number of memory applications and anti-counterfeiting schemes,’ he told the RSC.

SOURCE:
Royal Society of Chemistry: “Tuning Into A Radio Solution To Money Forgers”

The government said the one-cent coin costs too much produce and was described as “a burden to the economy” in a pamphlet released on Thursday.

According to an article published by the CBC, it costs the Royal Canadian Mint 1.6 cents to produce every penny.

“The government estimates it loses $11 million a year producing and distributing the penny, and that doesn’t include the costs and frustrations for businesses and consumers that use them in transactions,” the CBC reported. “A 2008 report by Quebec-based bank Desjardins estimated the penny’s existence cost Canada’s economy about $150 million in 2006. Canada’s big banks alone handle more than nine billion pennies a year, which costs them $20 million annually to process.”

The government said the penny has decreased to about 1/20th of its original purchasing power, but a report issued by the Bank of Canada in 2005 said the elimination of the penny wouldn’t lead to any inflation.

The one-cent coin will still hold their value, and consumers can still use the currency in transactions though under the new “penny plan” prices across the country will be rounded up or down to the nearest five-cent increment.

New pennies, however, will not be produced by the Mint so as coins get returned to financial institutions across the country, they will be recycled into their base materials leading to an eventual phase-out of the one-cent coin.

The Mint typically produces 7,000 tonnes worth of pennies each year, the CBC said.

This announcement comes in the same week the new $50 polymer bill was introduced into circulation. By the end of 2013, all Canadian denominations will be polymer notes. The new $100 bill was introduced in November.

SOURCE:
CBC: “The Penny’s Days Are Numbered”

According to an article published by Gizmodo, “physicists Christopher Fuller and Antao Chen found that ordinary handheld metal detectors were ale to recognize magnetic ink in a single dollar bill from just over an inch away. As multiple bills were stacked, the size of their magnetic field also increased, allowing the researchers to not only detect them from a greater distance, but also count how many there were.”

Magnetic ink in currency typically allows vending machines to verify the authenticity of banknotes.

The discovery is not without its challenges. Currently, metal detectors cannot detect the dollar value of stacks because each denomination uses the same amount of magnetic ink. According to the research, metal detectors would have to be vastly improved so they could automatically differentiate the magnetic ink from other sources.

Fuller and Chen are scheduled to present their work at an upcoming Defense, Security and Sensing conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

SOURCE:
Gizmodo: “Crime-Fighting Metal Detectors Could Count Stacks Of Cash And Foil Smugglers”