The Absence of Everything – New Concepts Pioneered by BDR and Partners

At the Currency Conference in May, Dieter Sauter, Vice President & General Manager Value Printing for Bundesdruckerei (BDR), unveiled the concept behind the ‘Dark Banknote Series‘, and the first note in this series (ExNihilo), which is the result of the SIRALab initiative. It demonstrates a remarkable, and potentially exciting, departure from conventional banknotes.

SIRALab is an innovation hub, with SIRA standing for Sustainability, Innovation, Recycling, Action. In BDR‘s words, the importance of each aspect is as follows:

• Sustainability is a key goal to secure the survival of mankind on earth. The banknote industry has already taken measures to a more sustainable approach, by incorporating sustainability into its processes and the core of its research and developments.

• Innovation has always been a major factor for growth. However, today the world is moving faster, and therefore new and diverse requirements are needed for innovation in the banknote industry in order to cope with the future.

• To secure our limited resources on the planet earth, further recycling measures are essential. Undertaking effective recycling within our industry starts by setting and early implementation of the right criteria into the banknote design.

• All these metrics will only be of value if the world takes action. The banknote industry can encourage this by fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

The innovation hub is a platform for partnership-based development that will create opportunities to look at innovations for the banknote of the future outside the usual framework.

In particular, SIRA will build a collaborative environment that brings together experts within and outside the banknote sector, research and develop new technologies by sharing ideas amongst partners at a very early stage, and launch and present ideas to potential customer prior to industrialisation.

Given that a common characteristic of the partners is limited vertical integration into the value creation process, SIRA will create opportunities to jointly acquire new technologies, product approaches and skills.

ExNihilo: The ‘Dark Banknote Series’

The first Ex Nihilo prototype birthed by SIRALab is the ‘Innovation’ banknote, whose defining innovative feature, its distinctive colour black, signifies a radical shift in convention.

The name ExNihilo describes the philosophical starting point for the project. With roots that reach back to Parmenides, Melissus of Samos and Aristotle in Ancient Greece, the Latin ‘ex nihilo nihil fi’ is often translated as ‘from nothing comes nothing.’ With the rise of digital payments worldwide, the concept of money becomes more and more independent of its material construct and approached a material state of nothingness.

Yet, says BDR, from this ‘nothing’ the banknote industry must innovate and discover new paths. Hence the concept of the ExNihilo series.

According to BDR, nothingness can be understood (among other ways) as the absence of everything. One cultural symbol for the absence of everything is the absence of light, which is best represented by the colour black – with which the cotton substrate has been dyed. Black has the great advantage that no one has ever attempted to produce dark banknotes. In this sense alone, dark banknotes will be interpreted as innovative.

But there are two other advantages as well. One is that the darkest black has been used and, if copied, will never be as black as the original. Hence the colour is in itself a security feature.

The other is that there is unused potential in dark banknotes that can even make them more secure, in particular a whole new spectrum of colours and effects. For example, outstanding UV and intaglio white can be used, whilst printing on a light-absorbing background enable unprecedented colour brilliance with new pigments.

The note also includes a chip with a thickness of less than 75 microns, which works via an NFC interface and is protected by a diffractive foil overlay.

The chip is a security feature in its own right as counterfeiters will need new competences if they want to ‘copy’ the banknote. Furthermore, there are several potential uses cases that are enabled by the chip, which intends to serve as a bridge between the traditional banknotes of today and the digital payment systems of tomorrow, shaping the future of currency, says BDR.