More Than You Knew There was to Know – the ‘Security Threads for Banknotes’ Report

The evolution of the security thread has happened at breakneck speed, with the pace accelerating in recent years. Today 95% of all paper banknotes contain a security thread and the options available can feel bewildering even to those familiar with banknotes. There is now a new way to make sense of all this – read the just published ‘Security Threads for Banknotes’ report from Currency News™.

There are 879 paper banknote denominations (86% of the total) and only 39 of them do not have a security thread. Details of all of the rest are in this report, including the location of the thread (embedded, windowed, front or back), the main optical effects and when they were introduced. Whether the reader is a central bank planning a new banknote series or a supplier or technology company trying to understand the options, here is the opportunity to see what other countries are doing.

Data without insight is just information , and this report gives that insight – providing a comprehensive view of today’s threads. It has to make sense of all the moving parts that contribute to the latest threads, and there are many. The fully illustrated 130-page report is laid out in a logical sequence starting with some history, focusing on the key benefits and costs and then following their creation.

That story includes:

• The evolution of paper making to enable windowed threads, allowing the public to see them easily. This required paper makers to change radically both how they made mould covers and the paper machines themselves.

• Windowed threads led to wider threads and then longer windows with wide threads. This has allowed the thread to carry increasingly visible and striking optical effects that the public can intuitively see and understand, but which the counterfeiter cannot readily replicate. Colour change, holographic effects, movement and combinations of all those are covered.

These changes, of course, have required new design skills for the thread itself and for the printer in order for the thread to work within a print design. Again, papermaking and, to some extent, printers have had to innovate to allow these new windows and materials to be manufactured, put into and held in paper and printed consistently and cost-effectively.

Papermakers have also innovated to introduce super wide embedded variants, some with a window, and surface threads that look more like a foil stripe.

• Machine readability has become an important part of the thread story. From simple ‘is it present or is it not’ magnetic threads, today threads can include coded versions that declare both the denomination of the thread and whether it is authentic based on the ‘signal’ it returns when interrogated by a detector. These threads are complex to make and need to be designed in carefully to work with the print design.

This list does not include demetallised or printed images included in threads or the use of UV coatings, since the options and variations can feel almost limitless. All this gives an indication of the versatility of the security thread.

Thread choices

Since 1999 there have only been three years without a significant new thread development (2000, 2009, 2012). The number of new products and the number of suppliers involved has steadily increased. Whether products are ‘new’ or ‘evolutions’ building on a base effect are for the reader to assess, but the number of basic effects remains relatively small. Of the 625 denominations with a windowed thread, 430 are ‘optically active’ based on three significant effects – diffractive (15%), micro-optics (39%) and colour shift (46%), or combinations of these.

13 thread suppliers, and their products, are reviewed in the report. Central banks and designers have never had so much choice.

The future

The report ends with some thoughts about the future. The role of windows, the importance of movement effects and the need for durable machine readability are likely to be centre stage in what is to come.

The modern thread has proved its value as a public and machine-readable security feature. The papermakers, thread manufacturers and printers have found innovative manufacturing routes to create striking, secure and cost-effective solutions able to compete with the other high security options open to a designer – watermarks, intaglio inks, applied features, security inks and windows.

Anybody who wants to bet against more radical thread solutions is brave!

Security Threads for Banknotes is available at a discounted price to Currency News subscribers via the Reconnaissance e-store (Reconnaissance is the majority partner in the Currency News joint venture). Central banks and issuing authorities receive the report free of charge. Contact info@currency-news.com for further information.