Others to benefit from the IPL's products are the general public, many of whom on a daily basis get their hard-earned money lost to counterfeiters in one way or another. "Banks currently are processing their cash manually thus facing problems relating to inefficiency and counterfeit notes," CEO IPL Naveed Ali Baig told Business Recorder on the sidelines of a seminar and road show on 'Automation of Currency Note Sorting', here at a hotel on Tuesday.
The event was well attended by executives mostly from banking sector, including some central bankers who, Baig said, were taking keen interest in his products. Having introduced in Pakistan, the power management giants like APC-MGE of France, the IPL this time has partnered with Germany's Giesecke & Derient (G&D) to automate currency note processing in the country.
G&D is a leading global provider of high-performance banknote processing systems ranging from end-to-end solution based software to high-tech note sorting machines like Numeron, BPS C1 and BPS C4. With Bank Al-Habib having taken the lead, at least two to three other banks are also engaged with IPL on what the Innovative chief said, a small level. With BPS C1 and BPS C4 on display at the seminar, Baig said the G&D products and solutions would enhance the banks' efficiency to count, authenticate, sort, pack and destroy billions of rupees currency bills in the shortest possible time.
"These machines are well and good. Sorting 10 bundles of banknotes would take us a whole day. But these machines do the same job in one hour," Muhammad Adeel, a cash manager at Habib Metropolitan Bank (HMB), told Business Recorder. The banker viewed that major problem with the currency notes was that of counterfeiting. "People have little or no knowledge of how to detect a fake currency bill and so counterfeit notes are circulating," said Adeel, whose bank has 214 branches and three sorting houses across Pakistan.
Khan, a footwear proprietor at Keamari's Jackson market, was left in the lurch when a customer last week handed him a fake currency note of 1000-rupee denomination. Enraged, he then broke the notes into pieces but still possess a half of the counterfeit bill, bearing number BR 4120704.
"It is the customers' right to have valid currency notes," viewed IPL CEO Baig. Asked if his was the first cash sorting machines to be launched in Pakistan, he replied in negative adding, however, that the existing ones were of low quality. Industry veteran and CEO of Wackenhut Pakistan, Abaad Elias, told the seminar participants that local banks should counter the menace of counterfeiting which was rampant. Elias suggested to the banks to outsource their cash management jobs to the Cash Management Companies, since the State Bank was unwilling to take the role of a depository.
The local banks must follow the suit as their counterparts in Austria, Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, Malaysia and South Africa had invested massively to automate their currency processing, he said. According to Baig, the prices of BPS C1 and BPS C4 ranged between Rs 0.4 million and Rs 10 million. Khalid Khan, IPL's VP Services, told the audience as to how the philosophy of his company centred on the customers who "pay our bills". IPL, he said, had installed over 100 engineers on 53 countrywide locations to better serve its clients. Earlier, Nader Kashgari and Kashif Ahmad of G&D from Dubai also spoke, respectively, on the company's banknote processing system and management solutions.