Komori Corporation has been supplying banknote and security printing presses to the industry since 1958. During this time there have been several new technological developments that have benefitted banknote printers worldwide and enabled improved quality and production.

However, Komori continue to invest time and money to a dedicated research and development programme to further improve their products. Working together with their customers, Komori investigates what is required, not only by the Central Banks and Commercial Security Printers, but by the printers themselves, whilst using that equipment.

Komori discovered some time back that combining certain processes would allow printers to streamline production and improve productivity and this presentation will introduce you to the latest offering from Komori.

The Currency NV32 Combination Press was launched during the summer of 2016 in our state-of-the-art Tsukuba plant in Japan. The press combines the two processes of numbering and varnishing banknotes in a single pass. Komori has utilised years of considerable experience of combination technology gained from working with their customers to bring to the market this latest innovation.

The future of cash remains unknown but Central Banks from all corners of the globe report that cash remains king as a preferred retail payment method. Today, 85% of worldwide consumer spending is done in cash despite many forecasting the demise of this resilient product. Based on global surveys circulated by Currency Research, we will present some valuable insight including the top non-cash innovations central bank survey respondents have predicted may have the greatest impact on currency usage in the future. What are the current trends in global payments and what impact are these truly having on cash in circulation? The future of cash is likely not a cash-less society but instead a less-cash society. How can we as an industry ensure an efficient cash supply chain if or when the decline becomes more pronounced? We will attempt to shed some light on this topic with insight from our surveys and forums dedicated to the currency function and payments.

UV on banknotes are usually limited UV fibbers embedded into the paper or to plain flat denomination/logo printed in one UV ink. Or with UV inks that reacts differently under two wavelength such as the second Euro series.

Full colour images printed also exists with more or less good rendering quality for ID documents such as passport where the pictures of the holder might be personalized in ink jet on the data page or visa page.

For banknotes it might appear complex to print full colour image on a banknote: this might mean having a second offset pass with 4 UV inks. Of course it will be more complex for a counterfeiter to print such a UV colour image than using only one ink, but this feature is still a second level feature: you need a tool such as a UV light to reveal the full colour UV images. It’s also not possible to superpose inks by printing in offset in our security printing field: the inks printed first could contaminate the ink tanks printed afterward.

The windows embedded into the banknotes offer us a new possible approach for UV images: the images printed on a window with transparent UV inks are still visible under standard lighting without any UV lamp. The UV inks are acting like a varnish and interact with standard illumination; the printed images appear almost as if printed in visible black ink on a window.

A special micro halftoning at high resolution is generated to print with a very accurate registration the inks side by side to avoid any ink superposition and to generate images with a brightness and a colourfulness that cannot be reached with inkjet personalisation printer.

A special colour gamut prediction model as well as a colour gamut reduction enables us from an input image to create the colour separation for the 4 UV inks to reach a high fidelity colour reproductions.

The main idea came from a request to identify a general security design with the help of a smartphone.

Developing such a feature is challenging. During the development process, we have analysed the printing process, the capturing process and certainly the forgeries. In the printing process analysis, we have compared different printing technologies that might be used during the counterfeiting process.

As we are talking about high security printed products, the print itself by definition should be a high-resolution offset or intaglio print printed with high quality printing machines. The identification would be done with a smartphone and the idea is to develop an application that can identify and authenticate the security print from counterfeits.   

As the resolution of a smartphone camera is limited, we had to find the most optimal settings, correct or eliminate distortions generated by the lens of the capturing device. Initially, we have selected one type of smartphone to reduce the number of variables in the developing process. The resolution of the analysed pictures is approximately 600dpi. For justified reasons (developing environment, latest technology camera resolution, etc.) we have selected the Galaxy SII/SIII/SIV and we optimized the process for this hardware. The minimum hardware requirement and the application will be optimized for other types of smartphones too.   

From the Central Bank of Hungary, we got a full range of forgeries starting from the very simple photocopies to the most complex offset printed banknotes. The research as input data used the forgeries of the Hungarian Forint.

The existing forged designs were only the beginning; today we know that a special structure or pattern is needed, printed either with offset or preferably Intaglio, to be able to identify the originality of a banknote. The pattern would be user definable and has to fulfil certain requirements. 

The presentation will describe the process itself and give some details about the challenges that we faced during the development process including statistics and test results.