Sweden Considers RFID in Money

Filed in archive Contactless Payment Systems on December 15, 2005

And in the category of yet another inventive use for RFID comes a note from Anders at the RFID Buzz blog.

It turns out that the Swedish national bank is considering adding RFID tags to banknotes. Anders writes:

Due to a number of high profile money transport robberies in recent years, the Swedish national bank (Riksbanken) is considering adding RFID tags to their banknotes, reports digi.no, quoting nyteknik.se

Several types of tags are under consideration: a passive id-tag for tracking stolen banknotes would form a first step; later they are considering tags that are de-activated during transport and storage and only activated once the banknotes are paid out from a cashpoint.

Upon first reading this my initial thought was, 'why resort to RFID -- why not use some other deterrent such as a dye pack?'

Dye packs actually are reasonably effective. They consist of bright red dye that explodes when a stack of stolen money is disturbed. Having seen a demonstration of an exploding dye pack once I can tell you that the hard-to-remove dye ends up everywhere. And the explosion itself is a rather startling event.

The problem with dye packs is that their use usually is limited to in-bank robberies. A teller must insert the dye-pack-rigged money into the bag given to the robber. That is not normally the procedure for cash pickups or deliveries at branch banks. So I guess I can see the logic of RFID tags in this situation.