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Certification of bill validators: What's the advantage?

June 13, 2013 by Vlad Kravtsov — Product Manager, Crane Payment Solutions

Despite the proliferation of cashless means of payment — including debit cards, credit cards and online and mobile payment options — cash circulation continues to grow in both developing and developed countries. Therefore, bill-validating devices play an important role in automated self-payment solutions that can be executed in retail store self-checkout systems, payment kiosks, vending machines or parking payment devices.

From the point of view of operators of those devices, what would be the most important features that bill validators must have? Operators of self-payment solutions want to provide the most convenient and consistent experience to their users. This would involve high acceptance on first bill insertion and high speed of bill acceptance.

At the same time, operators are concerned with the bill validators' ability to detect and reject counterfeit bank notes that may otherwise impose a financial loss. The unfortunate reality is that counterfeit bank notes continue to pose a threat to any business and the sophistication of counterfeits has become a more serious issue.

To guarantee high security performance of bill validators, what would be more significant than having them certified by the central bank? Apparently, any central bank is the clear expert in its own currency security features. They would be the best judge to decide on a particular bill validators' ability to distinguish between genuine and counterfeit bank notes.

An example of such certification program is one developed by Russian Central bank. In essence, this program attempts to verify that bill-payment products are compliant with the bank's requirement for "mandatory inspection of at least four machine-readable security features of the Central Bank of Russian Federation bank notes."

What needs to be understood is that in addition to detecting a traditional optical bank note image, bill validators can potentially detect other security features on bank notes. These features include magnetic, ultra violet and infra-red. Having a bill validator that assesses a bank note's genuineness based on more than just its optical image really means having more assurance in detecting and successfully rejecting counterfeits.

Passing the bank certification program primarily means a high level of objectivity with actual performance of a bill validator. This goes far beyond just internal testing done by a bill validator vendor and should give much more credibility for businesses that decide to employ such a device.

Another advantage is that certification is not a one-time event, but rather on an ongoing process that will take place every year. This is to guarantee compliance with changing currency validation requirements.

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