Announcing the first Future of Money Design Award competition
Consult Hyperion's Head of Mobile Money, Paul Makin, made a presentation about "E-ink and smart banknotes" at the 13th Digital Money Forum in London back in March 2010. It was based on some work that Consult Hyperion had been doing with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You can thank of a smart banknote as comprising four main technological components:
- The note itself, made out of a plastic polymer rather than paper. This makes it durable and waterproof, important if it is to contain electronics. Some countries (eg, Australia) have already switched from paper to plastic for their banknotes and others (eg, Canada) are planning to follow. Plastic banknotes last much longer than paper ones, so the additional cost of production doesn't stop them from being cost-effective.
- The electronic ink display on the note. Electronic ink, as you'll recall, only uses power when it is changing, so once the banknote display has been written then it will stay displaying the same thing until it changed.
- The chip inside the banknote. Why do we need a chip inside the banknote? Well, we want the banknote to be secure: we don't want it to be counterfeited or altered. And we need the banknote to be able to communicate intelligently with terminals.
- The antenna connected to the chip. We want our smart banknote to work like an Oyster card, so that you only need to tap it to some form of terminal for it to work.
How would such a note be used? Well, imagine that you have a banknote that says "£10" on it. You to the coffee shop and spend £1.50 on a coffee. You tap the note on the till to pay, and the display now changes to say "£8.50". When you get to work, your friend reminds you that you owe him £8 from the pub. You give him the note and he gives you a 50p coin in change. Your friend can absolutely trust that the value represented by the note is indeed £8.50 because the tamper-resistant chip and the cryptography it deploys make it impossible to counterfeit.
It's hard to imagine the implications so a technology combination so radical in everyday use. Take just one aspect: the expense and complexity of engraving plates, adding holograms, printing fine detail and everything else that is needed to make notes hard to counterfeit. A smart banknote needs none of these, because its security depends on cryptography and the chip tamper-resistance. The state-of-the-art here is already more than adequate for purpose. There are other differences too: since the smart banknote works using contactless communications, there's no reason for it to be a rectangle. The best smart banknote might be a ball, or a strip or a disc.
But what would a banknote look like without security printing, freed from the tyranny of form factor and with a display that changes? That's an interesting question. Since it's about technology, it's easy for people like me to imagine how a smart banknote might work. It's much harder to imagine what it might look like, and that's why we have commissioned the artist Austin Houldsworth, who presented at the 12th Digital Money Forum in 2009 as part of the Royal College of Art "Future of Money" display, has been commissioned by us to run the first Future of Money Design Award competition. There's a first prize of £500, so if you know a creative artisit who wants to work with money (!) point them to http://futuremoneyaward.com/ right away!
