Submitting Organziation Name and role, if any, in the Project
Giesecke+Devrient owns, develops, maintains, implements and supports Compass Banknote Intelligence.
Date the Program was launched
Organization/s that is ”responsible for, owns, initiated or facilitated” the Cash Visibility Program/Initiative
Project Description
In the dynamic world of currency management, central banks and printworks face significant challenges in managing the lifecycle and quality of banknotes. These stakeholders grapple with issues like inefficient currency management, lack of transparency in the cash cycle, and difficulties in detecting and combating counterfeit currency. Addressing these challenges is crucial not only for operational efficiency but also for maintaining the integrity and trust in currency systems globally.
Enter Giesecke+Devrient’s Compass Banknote Intelligence, a revolutionary Cloud-based platform designed to transform how stakeholders view and manage banknotes. Launched in 2024, this solution offers a comprehensive toolkit for high-volume data analysis and seamless integration across the cash cycle. Key features include:
- Strategic Currency Management: Enables central banks to make informed decisions regarding currency issuance and withdrawal, optimizing both cost and supply.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance: Improves the ability to track and trace banknotes, bolstering efforts against counterfeiting.
- Quality Control and Production Optimization: Assists printworks in refining production processes, ensuring the highest standards of banknote quality and durability.
- Collaborative Feedback Loops: Facilitates a deeper collaboration between central banks and printworks, fostering mutual benefits and continuous improvement.
Implemented in diverse geographical regions including Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, Compass Banknote Intelligence showcases its global applicability and scalability. Its Cloud-native architecture not only promises robust security and operational efficiency but also positions Compass Banknote Intelligence as a future-ready solution, poised to integrate emerging technologies and data sources, continually enhancing cash cycle transparency and efficiency.
Project Team
Countries where implemented
Compass Banknote Intelligence has been implemented in two countries in Europe and the Americas, with two further implementations in countries in Africa and Asia. Due to strict confidentiality clauses we are unable to share further details on customers at this stage.
This demonstrates Compass Banknote Intelligence’s global reach and versatility in meeting diverse market needs around the world.
The benefit received to stakeholder/s from having more cash visibility via the new program
Compass Banknote Intelligence provides specialized benefits to central banks and printworks, each leveraging the platform to enhance visibility and foster collaboration throughout the cash cycle:
Central Bank benefits:
- Strategic Currency Management: utilize detailed circulation data for decisions on currency issuance, design modifications, and withdrawal timings, optimizing currency supply and costs.
- Economic Analysis: gain insights into cash circulation and usage patterns for informed monetary policy decisions.
- Security and Compliance: enhance tracking and tracing of banknotes to combat counterfeiting and ensure currency integrity.
- Enhanced Visibility: improve transparency in the cash cycle, enabling more effective coordination and management of currency operations.
- Open Connectivity: commercial cash cycle stakeholders can easily be integrated to provide the necessary data for further cash visibility.
Printworks benefits:
- Production Optimization: monitor and refine printing processes through feedback on banknote quality and durability, improving print quality and reducing errors.
- Quality Control: maintain high standards and minimize printing anomalies, ensuring cost savings and reputation enhancement.
- Collaborative Feedback Loop: establish a feedback mechanism with central banks, enhancing mutual understanding and cooperation in banknote production and lifecycle management.
Compass Banknote Intelligence helps central banks and printworks achieve significant operational improvements through enhanced visibility and collaborative strategies.
Central banks can make data-driven decisions affecting national currency management, and printworks can enhance production quality and efficiency. This partnership enables better management of currency lifecycles, boosts the overall security and integrity of the monetary system, and promotes a more synchronized approach in the banknote ecosystem.
Each stakeholder uses the platform’s insights to optimize their specific processes and strategic goals, leading to superior outcomes and a more resilient cash cycle.
The level of collaboration involved with the cash visibility program
Compass Banknote Intelligence is a platform, providing a range of tools to gain insights and visibility into banknote and cash cycle data.
Value is optimised through strong collaboration with central banks, printworks and other industry stakeholders, who identify and develop use cases based on the available tools.
Compass Banknote Intelligence is designed specifically to encourage and support cash cycle collaboration. The scalable, flexible platform, data lake approach and Cloud-native technology are all geared towards easy creation and extraction of insights to improve visibility across the cash cycle.
Examples of Compass Banknote Intelligence customer use cases to increase visibility, achieved through collaboration between G+D and cash cycle stakeholders, include:
- A Central Bank trial comparing hybrid and cotton banknotes, revealing that hybrid substrates outperform cotton in longevity and durability, suggesting a potential shift in future banknote production to enhance performance and sustainability. This visibility helps drive strategic supplier and design decisions, impacting the whole cash cycle.
- A separate Central Bank implementation aiming to maintain control over banknote quality, enhance fraud detection, and optimize operational processes by integrating data from their operational cash processing system. This visibility is more operational in nature, driving continuous improvement and supporting the fight against fraud.
- Connecting the dots between cash cycle data and Printworks production and single note inspection data. This allows for precise analysis and the identification of trends between banknote feature design, environmental conditions, production equipment, consumables, and ultimately performance in circulation. Based on these insights, action can be taken improve banknote quality and effectively test new features.
These examples, amongst many others, demonstrate the breadth of insights which can be achieved through collaboration on the Compass Banknote Intelligence platform.
The uniqueness, creativity, and/or resourcefulness of the design/plan for the program
The Compass Banknote Intelligence platform showcases a unique blend of creativity and resourcefulness in its design and implementation, distinguishing it from other solutions in the cash cycle. Central to its innovative approach is its flexible, scalable design, which allows for seamless adaptation to the evolving needs of various stakeholders involved in the cash cycle. This flexibility ensures that as new data sources become available, they can be integrated effortlessly, enhancing the platform’s utility and relevance.
Further enhancing its uniqueness is the fully cloud-native architecture. By leveraging cloud technology, Compass Banknote Intelligence ensures global accessibility, robust scalability, and high cybersecurity standards. This cloud-native design also facilitates quicker and simpler implementations and upgrades compared to traditional on-premise solutions, minimizing disruption and reducing operational costs.
The platform is designed to cater to different user groups through diverse outputs. It provides intuitive, configurable visual dashboards for business and operational users, while also offering an expert environment for more technical users. This expert environment is supported by Apache Spark and Azure Databricks, allowing those with knowledge in Python, R, SQL, and Scala to perform sophisticated data analyses and visualizations directly.
A standout feature of the Compass Banknote Intelligence platform is the capability to transform complex machine-generated files into human-readable data. This is particularly evident in the conversion of BPS files in Databricks, a process that underscores the platform’s unique selling proposition (USP). By converting rich, technical banknote processing data into accessible formats, the platform empowers users to derive meaningful insights effortlessly, facilitating informed decision-making.
The effective use of technology in the program
Compass Banknote Intelligence is a fully Cloud-based solution utilizing the latest data and visualisation technology, providing full scalability, intuitive usability, and easy implementations and upgrades.
The platform is based on Microsoft Azure, which provides customers with the latest functional, technical and security updates, as well as full scalability and global coverage to comply with data residency requirements where applicable.
Compass Banknote Intelligence utilises a data lake rather than data warehouse. This means raw data is selected and organized as needed, optimizing resources and performance.
To meet the varying needs of users, various visualization and interpretation methods are available:
- Intuitive, configurable, visual dashboards are available for business and operational users
- An expert environment based, on Apache Spark and Azure Databricks, to allow users with knowledge of Python, R, SQL and Scala to make direct queries and visualisations
- AI assistant to easily turn human questions into data queries and with this into data insights
- API interface to allow for system-to-system integration
To ensure the highest levels of cybersecurity, we apply five fundamental pillars:
- Infrastructure Protection: based on Microsoft Azure Cloud technology with the highest security services, complying with over 90 global and regional standards with continuous monitoring and updating of security features
- Data Security and Privacy: Secure data separation, always encrypted in transmission via SFTP and TLS1.2, and in storage
- Identity and Access Management: Secure authentication with multi-factor and certificates
- Vulnerability Management: Detection controls and incident response, minimizing impact by segmenting access, network and data from the beginning
- Zero Trust Approach: as a principle, Compass Banknote Intelligence always verifies explicitly, uses least privileged access, assumes breaches and takes early measures in response
G+D is successfully SOC2 audited and is in the process of a SOC2 Type 2 audit. Compass Banknote Intelligence is pen-tested annually, with results shared with customers on request.
