Getting Ahead of the Curve – the Banknote of the Future

Dr Andrzej Nowak, Head of Open Innovation at SICPA, presented at the Future of Cash conference in Warsaw in November about what a radical banknote of the future could look like.

The world we live in is changing which, in turn, is changing cash use, attitudes and cycles. SICPA has challenged itself to think about how a banknote of the future could look. This is not a technology project, it does not aim to be prescriptive or definitional, and it does not seek to claim its thinking or findings as a fact or claim that can be evaluated as true or false.

The framework for this exercise has been based around three questions:

• What is the purpose of non-traditional banknotes and who do they serve?
• Which functions or features of a non-traditional banknote could be useful to which stakeholders?
• How can those features be achieved with available and emerging technologies?

One could use the properties or attributes of a banknote to define their purpose, consider different evolutions of payment instruments over time or compare physical and digital payment artefacts to see what they do, or could do.