Reconnaissance International, co-publishers of Currency News, have launched DataVault 2.0, which has been comprehensively overhauled with a wealth of new information and an intuitive interface, and is now offered with a range of flexible subscription options to suit all budgets and research needs.
DataVault 2.0 is the industry’s only dedicated tool for accurate, up-to-date and aggregated data on circulating banknotes and coins, built for the professionals who design, produce, regulate, and secure physical currency. According to Reconnaissance, ‘we’ve done the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to spend hours scouring websites, cross-referencing data and/or generating reports.’ For anyone – from central banks to printers and mints to suppliers to researchers - benchmarking security features for a new banknote series, researching coin compositions, or tracking issuance trends, DataVault 2.0 provides structured, searchable data updated monthly – saving hours if not days in time-consuming research.
The data has been compiled by industry experts, and the information is both accurate and current. At its heart is a powerful search engine where, critically, unlike other banknotes and coins databases in the market, the information can be searched not just by country or denomination, but across multiple fields and combinations thereof, aggregated and then (depending on the subscription level), downloaded.
From there, trends and features can be analysed in a fraction of the time it would take to collate the information manually, enabling you to keep up effortlessly with developments in currency issuance.
Central banks & monetary authorities – to benchmark designs, specifications and security features against global peers.
Security printers & substrate manufacturers – to track adoption of technologies, substrates, and feature combinations worldwide.
Mints & blank manufacturers – to compare coin dimensions, alloys, and edge treatments across issuers.
Researchers – to access a single authoritative source for global analysis.
Law enforcement & compliance teams – to reference current and superseded denomination details.
DataVault 2.0 has two active and fully populated modules for coins and banknotes, and a third under development on cash in circulation.
The banknote module contains all the world’s denominations (circulating and commemorative) with unmatched depth on overt security features.
Banknotes can be filtered and compared across any combination of region, country, currency, substrate, or security feature — with the flexibility to build precise queries using AND/OR logic across multiple feature dimensions.
For coins, the database includes circulating coin denominations only, with detailed physical and material specifications.
The cash module, currently in the development phase, tracks trends in banknote and coin circulation by country – offering value, volume, and denomination breakdown over time. It includes economic indicators such as GDP, CPI, population, ATMs, and bank branches data from the World Bank. This is available in the current prototype mode free of charge.
DataVault 2.0 is being refined and enhanced on an almost daily basis. Recent additions include currency symbols, currency codes, industry awards tracking (HSP, IACA and more), and suppliers (printer, substrate, feature) per denomination (which is still a work-in-progress).
DataVault now also hosts the online version of the Currency and Technology Supplier Directory - a comprehensive directory of the organisations that design, produce and supply the currency industry worldwide.
Future plans include printer information and counterfeiting information, with a dream of annual production volumes, although this is not without challenges. And once the cash module is fully up and running, all three modules will link, thereby multiplying the search options.
DataVault 2.0 can be explored for free with access to six countries by going to: https://datavault.reconnaissance.net.
So how could you use DataVault?
A central bank is considering a redesign and wants to move from portraits to flora and fauna. How many circulating banknotes (including commemoratives) use this design theme?
DataVault tells us in 2 seconds that 410 individual banknotes use the flora and/or fauna design theme. What if I only want to know about the polymer banknotes? Answer: 96. Which of these have a vertical orientation on both sides? 15 of them. And lists them all, with links to full information to each that can also be downloaded.
A question that many banknote suppliers ask is which banknotes are coming up for a redesign or upgrade. As a rule of thumb, banknotes are generally redesigned or upgraded every 7 to 10 years to enhance the security features and stay ahead of the counterfeiters. So identifying those of a certain age is a good place to looking for answers to that question.
We dug through DataVault to determine how many banknotes were issued before 2018 that are still in circulation. The instant answer is 436. What if we are only concerned about the Asian region? No problem, 139 banknotes were from the Asian region. But what if we only want to know about the paper banknotes? In seconds DataVault tells us that 115 banknotes were issued in the Asian region on paper before 2018 and are still in circulation. And, above all, which ones.
A supplier wants to know how they compare to their competitors features that are currently on circulating banknotes. Let’s look at security threads. 823 banknotes have these. 69 are printed threads on polymer banknotes – so let’s ignore those and just look at paper and composite banknotes, which leaves 754. Which ones have micro-optics? 158, 121 on the front and 37 on the back. What about micro-mirror threads? 105 – 75 on the front and 30 on the back. Clearly, windowed threads are more commonly placed on the front than on the back side of a banknote.
Moreover, DataVault also includes links to a more detailed description of each feature. Given that there are over 80 branded overt features alone, it’s an extremely useful reminder of what each one is and does.
All of these statistics were uncovered using DataVault and it only took a matter of seconds for each query. DataVault not only returns statistics but provides a list of all the relevant notes (or coins), with links to all. And as a further bonus, you can also download and save the data.
Imagine having this at your fingertips, instantly. Digging for data has never been easier. Explore DataVault for free with access to 6 countries by going to: https://datavault.reconnaissance.net.
Happy digging!
