Investigating How Micro-lenses could Serve as an Innovative Currency Security Feature

Our Client & Their Goals

Our Client, a global banknote manufacturer, was planning to develop their next-generation security features. Security features must be improved frequently, as those seeking to counterfeit currency persist in their efforts to reverse engineer these security features. Our Client’s key challenge was to develop security features that would be difficult to reproduce accurately on a counterfeit banknote, but that could still be manufactured cheaply using high-speed processes.

Our Client knew that substantial progress had recently been made involving “micro-lenses”, and recognised that this technology area might be relevant to their development of security features. However, our Client was unfamiliar with the highly-technical fields where these new developments were occurring, and needed expert guidance to investigate whether this technology could achieve their goals.

To determine whether this technology would work for their intended applications, we assembled an interdisciplinary team with expertise in nano-lenses and in high-speed manufacturing. Their task was to help our client understand whether any technologies showed promise as security features that would be both effective and easy to manufacture.

CamIn's Solution

Specifically, we assembled two project teams of technology and industry experts to focus on two distinct aspects of anti-counterfeiting technology: security feature design and manufacturing techniques for security features. Both of our teams identified a range of state-of-the-art solutions and promising experimental technologies. After investigating over 15 new micro-lens designs, our team selected the five that were most suitable for use with our Client’s application context as a next generation security feature. Our manufacturing team also identified more than 20 manufacturing techniques and determined that three were most compatible with our Client’s high-speed manufacturing requirements.

Our teams then identified the manufacturing technique most suitable for use with the selected micro-lens design, which was then evaluated in our Client’s application context as a difficult-to-counterfeit security feature. Finally, we selected and benchmarked the most promising start-ups and research groups that our Client might partner with to complete their development of these next-generation security features.

Within a few months, our Client was able to establish partnerships to drive their development of these new micro-lens-based security features towards a pilot product.

The Impact

Our analysis identified several innovative technologies that were new to our Client, and our interdisciplinary team of experts determined innovative methods for manufacturing novel micro-lens-based security features. Within a few months, our Client was able to establish partnerships to drive their development of these new microlens-based security features towards a pilot product.