DASA is part of the Ministry of Defence. Its remit is to find and fund “exploitable innovation to support UK defence and security quickly and effectively, and support UK prosperity”. 

The market exploration is aimed at developing an understanding of capabilities that currently exist, or of new ideas that could potentially become new security features for banknotes.

“The Bank of England is now looking ahead and inviting ideas to develop novel security features and print technologies for consideration for potential use in future generations of banknotes,” DASA stated.

It said the technologies would need to be suitable for integration into a banknote design, and fulfil the following criteria: be difficult to counterfeit or simulate; easy to communicate, and easy and intuitive for the public in use; durable; and compatible with high-volume printing techniques.

Techniques that will not be considered include holographic foils, lenticular lens features, and optically variable inks.

Current banknotes have a range of overt security features to help the public recognise genuine notes, such as see-through windows (in the case of polymer banknotes), colour-shifting foils with fine details, raised printing, and holograms with flipping images.

Interested parties can submit innovation outlines via DASA’s Enterprise Collaboration Service platform for the submission of proposals, which contains further guidance about submissions.

The submissions period runs until the end of March 2020.