KARACHI: Taking cognizance of circulation counterfeit currency notes, State Bank of Pakistan has adopted a three pronged strategy to manage this risk. The strategy aims at ensuring state of the art security features in our banknotes, which are difficult to counterfeit; developing necessary capacity and infrastructure with banks to issue genuine and authenticated banknotes to the public; and creating awareness amongst general public about the security features of our banknotes. Following the strategy SBP has issued new series of banknotes between 2005-2008 with significantly enhanced security features comparable with those of Euro, Pound Sterling, and US Dollar.

A statement released by SBP here on Tuesday said recently the issue of counterfeit currency notes in circulation was discussed during a briefing given by a team from SBP to the Senate’s Standing Committee on Finance. During the briefing the Chairman of the committee asked the SBP team to look into the complaints by public about them having received such notes from some banks.

The presence of counterfeit currencies is an undeniable fact not only in our country but across the globe and SBP being cognizant of the issue has been taking necessary measures to deal with this menace.

While the primary responsibility to check the influx of counterfeit notes lies with the Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), it observed.

In order to ensure that banks issue genuine and authenticated banknotes to the public, they are required to issue only sorted cash to the public from their cash counters and ATMs. The cash received in the branches cannot be issued unless sorted. Bulk of the sorting activity is, however, manual and vulnerable to human errors. To improve this capacity, SBP has advised banks to install banknotes authentication and sorting machines. From 2nd January 2017 the banks will only be issuing machine authenticated banknotes from their branches and ATMs.