Mexico’s new 100 peso banknote has beaten more than 100 other candidates to win the prestigious Banknote of the Year Award for 2020, awarded by the International Bank Note Society (IBNS).

Late last year Danmarks Nationalbank began the upgrade of its banknote series with a new 500 kroner, setting the scene for more advanced security features across all its banknotes.

A number of central banks are investing time and money to understand the life cycle and performance of banknotes based on tracking the changes in individual banknote detector scores over time. It does this by reading banknote serial numbers, and their detector data, and analysing the results. Given the number of detectors on a sorting machine, the volume of data generated reaches the realms of ‘big data’.

As part of a series of webinars from the World Banknote Summit, Jacques Lang presented for Seprinto & Partners (S&P) three examples of how they have helped banknote printers optimise their production, reducing their consumables and waste.

At the recent Digital Document Security Online conference, held at the end of March, Sina Gebrodt, a final-year student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, reported on the project that she and Madison Bucher, a user-experience designer, had undertaken on the future of banknotes. This project was sponsored by Koenig & Bauer Banknote Solutions (K&B).

The Four Nations group was founded in 1978 and consists of five central bank members – the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Bank of Canada, Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank of England and Banco de México. The group is a forum in which its members share information and experiences on banknote development, issuance and distribution, counterfeit deterrence, and relevant technical studies.

For many people, their perception of plastic is negative. Plastic is one of the world’s ‘bad guys’ these days, with newspaper headlines and TV programmes dominated by images of polluted oceans or mountainous garbage dumps. But, as always, the truth is more nuanced than the ‘all plastic is bad’ trope might have you believe.

The UK was the first major economy to pass laws for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and has cut emissions by more than 40% since 1990. It’s also committed to reduce its emissions at least 68% compared to 1990 levels – this is the fastest rate of reductions from a major economy to date and will help contribute towards the international goal of limiting the global temperature rise to below 1.5°C.

With a climate goal of a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2022 (base year 2016), Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) and its papermaking and feature subsidiary Louisenthal state that they are making a significant contribution towards climate protection – surpassing the goal, and achieving a reduction of 32% in 2020.

Portals published its Sustainability Report on April’s Earth Day. With two UK paper mills, one at Overton making banknote paper based on cotton and one at Bathford making security papers based on wood pulp, sustainability is potentially a big issue for the company.

The year of the pandemic saw Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) take a wide range of steps to ensure payments worked effectively, according to its 2020 Annual Report.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw payment behaviour deviate markedly from historical trends. Unsurprisingly this features heavily in the Bank of Canada’s 2020 annual report. On one hand it put pressures on its cash inventories as the Bank moved fast to boost stocks at its regional distribution centres. Its operations centres had to respond with agility and to innovate to ensure cash supply was uninterrupted.

Giesecke+Devrient, like so many other companies, has faced considerable challenges over the past year. But through effective cost management and by increasing the margins in its business, it was able to boost its operating result for 2020 by 13% to €153 million on revenue of €2.3 billion, which was only slightly down (-5%) on last year. The net profit for the year was €43 million.

The last year has been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to surprise and to wreak huge damage. But perhaps there is another global issue that is just as urgent – namely, climate change and, as part of that, environmental sustainability.

Portals, the second largest commercial banknote and security paper manufacturer, has entered into an agreement with Fedrigoni, one of the leading European producers of specialty papers and self-adhesive labels, to buy its security business based in Bollate in Italy, which specialises in security threads and foils.

Schuler Press, the leading manufacturer of coin production equipment, has reached a major milestone with the sale this month of its 1,000th high performance minting press.

Japan will begin issuing newly redesigned ¥500 coins from around November, the Finance Ministry has said, after their initial release in the first half of the fiscal year from April was postponed due to the pandemic, and in particular delays to updates to ticket and automated teller machines.

The success of the new polymer series and falling transactional demand are behind the Bank of England’s proposal to close its regional cash distribution centre in the northern city of Leeds, in February 2023.

As described in April's Comment article, other than the current pandemic, the main topic of major global concern – and one that will endure long after the pandemic has (we hope) receded – is the environment.

G+D has also announced that it is joining forces with the Swedish fintech start-up Doconomy to enhance payment solutions with digital sustainability-oriented tools.