The sheer volume of Euro notes circulating around the EU make it an attractive proposition to counterfeiters. It is for this reason that the European Central Bank has implemented strict requirements which require that no counterfeit notes are re-circulated by cash handling devices. The Eurothentic project seeks to resolve this problem through an intelligent new system of authentication including fitness analysis of the bank note.
The Eurothentic system provides high performance bank note validation. By the control software, web interfaces and the central database developed by Eesti Innovatsiooni Instituut, the Eurothentic system records and analyses an image of the bank note and archives the processed data. It tracks bank notes through a secure network, and constantly updates the database and system through this network.
The Eurothentic system securely tracks bank note serial numbers and other characteristics such as nominal value, defects and time to identify bank notes that are valid or counterfeit. In addition, the Eurothentic system was validated in European Central Bank in September 2013 in Rome.
The Eurothentic system overcomes the current technical barriers to wide scale adoption of cash authentication technology in cash machines. It does so with a low-cost, retrofitable cash validating module. There are currently no cash validation modules which does validation, nominal value identification and counterfeit recognition at the same time. The Eurothentic system reduces the bottleneck created by currently available cash validation systems and significantly cuts the time it takes to process a bank note.