"The SBP has a wide range of responsibilities relating to banknotes, from ensuring an adequate supply to protecting and maintaining confidence in the currency," said the SBP Governor - File photo

KARACHI: Coping with rising counterfeiting of banknotes is the major challenge for a central bank to ensure public confidence in its currency.

Governor State Bank Yaseen Anwar stated this while inaugurating the Upgraded Security Inks Manufacturing Facility of SICPA (Société Industrielle et Commerciale de Produits Agricoles) on Thursday.

“We must stay ahead of counterfeiters and protect the integrity of our currency. Gaining and maintaining public confidence in the currency is a key role for any central bank,” he observed.

“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 the main goal of security printing for the central bank is to prevent forgery, tampering, and counterfeiting of banknotes. The SBP governor said the soundness of a nation’s currency is essential to the soundness of its economy. “The 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.

He said that advanced security features involving ink play a very important role in defeating the endeavours of counterfeiters, curbing the circulation of fake currency.

“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 the Optical Variable Ink (OVI) design, Infra-red ink designs, UV fluorescent ink, and SICPA TALK ink images,” he elaborated.Anwar said that it was quite heartening to see the growth of PSPC and its collaboration with SICPA the leading global provider of security inks and solutions for most of the world’s banknotes.

“In the fast-paced environment people need to rely instinctively on their senses of sight and touch to authenticate a banknote in a fraction of a second.

In this context, one of the central bank’s main roles is to provide the citizens with security features that are easy to detect and identify at the blink of an eye,” he added.

He said that all our new design banknotes have machine readable features that are useful for processing and detection of counterfeiting through note processing machines and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs).