Ulster Bank, one of Northern Ireland’s three note issuing bank, has now released its new £50, the design of which focuses on the province’s industries and the achievements of women in Northern Ireland.

India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has launched a special series of coins to mark the country’s 75th anniversary of independence, at a special ceremony organised by the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Currency Affairs.

SICPA’s IMMERSION event this year, which took place via a series of one-day workshops spanning April and May, focused on the future and features, with innovation as the constant theme throughout.

27 June is World ATM Day. On this day 55 years ago, the world’s first 24/7 cash machine, or Automated Teller Machine as it was later to become known, was unveiled in London.

WaveFront Technology – a California-based supplier of nano and micro-structured tools, coatings and films for the security, lighting, aerospace, and display markets – used the Banknote & Currency Conference in February as an opportunity to debut its new new portfolio of security features for currency and other security applications.

Banknote lifetime values need to be treated with care because it is easy to form misleading conclusions. The biggest challenge is ensuring that a fair comparison is being made and that comparisons are made on representative data. The before and after scenarios should be like-for-like.

CCL Secure has achieved a 26% reduction in carbon emissions per tonne of product at its Wigton site in England since 2018. With the support of sustainability consultants Verco, CCL Secure has reduced manufacturing emissions across all three scopes of greenhouse gases, without the inclusion of carbon offsets and market based instruments.

Not many people know that Royal Dutch Kusters Engineering (Kusters) used to make fluorescent lamp recycling equipment for the electronics giant Philips, glass recycling for the brewer Heineken and coffee pod recycling for Sara Lee.

High Security Printing™ EMEA took place 13-15 June in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital on the Baltic Sea. Famed for its ‘white nights’ in mid-summer, when the sun hardly sets, Tallinn is the country’s cultural hub.

Casa de Moneda Argentina (CMA) is in the midst of a technology transformation programme involving the recruitment and training of new staff, modernisation of both its production facilities and the acquisition of new equipment, among them the latest SPARK Flow® module for the NotaScreen. It has also invested in an upgrade of Koenig & Bauer Banknote Solutions’ ONE design software to the latest 2.1 version.

In the December edition of Industry Watch, the focus was on the implications of a new infectious COVID variant, Omicron. In the March edition, the focus switched to the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia and the implications, if the war continued, of a global fuel, food, fertilizer and aluminium crisis. This on top of the shortages of many goods used in manufacturing – a legacy of COVID.

Whilst Crane Currency is, or rather was, first and foremost a paper maker, it is also the developer of the micro-optics feature MOTION® and its derivatives for threads and, more recently, for surface-applied stripes.

Currency News™ has published annual updates on the banknote developments at the global level since September 2017. The hope that this year’s update would illustrate some kind of return to a new normal in cash demand has proved to be unrealistic.

Both before, during and since the two years of COVID, the industry has become very aware of what has become known as the cash paradox, identified as the continued growth of cash in circulation compared with a country’s GDP, despite its declining use for payments.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has received approval for a budget of at least P25 billion ($450 million) for the construction of its new Currency Production Facility (CPF) in a 31.2 hectare complex in New Clark City in Capas, Tarlac.

In April, the Central Bank of Tunisia completed the introduction of its latest series of four banknotes, the 11th since its inception in 1958, making it one of Africa’s most prolific banknote issuers.

The Governor of the Sveriges Riskbank, Stefan Ingves, will step down at the end of this year, to be replaced by the country’s chief financial regulator, Erik Thedéen.

The Future of Cash conference, which returns this year as an in-person event taking place 14-16 September in Madrid, was the first of its kind to bring together all stakeholders involved in the cash cycle.

The Asia Cash Cycle Seminar returns to its live and in person format, after a three-year hiatus, taking place 5-7 September in Manila, 10 years after it was last held in the Philippines.

Counterfeiting of Australian banknotes is approaching its lowest level in a decade. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has carried out an analysis of the factors playing a role in this decline and quantified their effects. The report – Recent Trends in Counterfeiting – has been published in its June Bulletin.