Governor, State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Yaseen Anwar has said the main goal of security printing for the central bank is to prevent forgery, tampering, and counterfeiting of banknotes. "We must stay ahead of counterfeiters and protect the integrity of our currency", he said while inaugurating the Upgraded Security Inks Manufacturing Facility of SICPA, Pakistan Thursday.

He observed that the soundness of a nation's currency is essential to the soundness of its economy. "As the nation's central bank, SBP has a wide range of responsibilities relating to banknotes, from ensuring an adequate supply to protecting and maintaining confidence in the currency", he added.

"Together with our partners at Pakistan Security Printing Corporation (PSPC) and the law enforcement agencies, we continuously monitor the counterfeiting threats for each denomination, and make re-design decisions based on these threats", he noted.

Anwar said that gaining and maintaining public confidence in the currency is a key role for any central bank. "Undoubtedly, one of the major challenges facing a central bank in ensuring public confidence in its currency is the rise of counterfeit banknotes", he opined.

He said that advanced security features involving ink play a very important role in defeating the endeavours of counterfeiters, thereby curbing the circulation of fake currency. "Increasingly, as counterfeiters become more sophisticated, the central banks admit that they need to push security printing for new technologies and new substrates", he said.

"To help prevent counterfeiting, SICPA's security ink technology plays a vital role in making our banknotes difficult to counterfeit through state-of-the-art security features such as the Optical Variable Ink (OVI) design, Infra-red ink designs, UV fluorescent ink, and SICPA TALK ink images", he added.

SBP Governor said that all new design banknotes have machine readable features that are useful for processing and detection of counterfeiting through note processing machines and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs).