Norway to issue new, more secure banknotes

Norway's central bank said on Tuesday that it would put new and more secure banknotes into circulation from summer 2017.

"As the central bank, Norges Bank bears the responsibility for ensuring that the security level of Norwegian banknotes is sufficiently high at all times," the bank's governor Oystein Olsen was quoted as saying in a statement.

"Norges Bank has therefore produced a new banknote series that is more secure than ever before," he said.

In recent years, a number of Norway's neighboring countries have issued new and more secure banknotes, and fortunately only a very small proportion of banknotes in Norway are counterfeit, according to the banks.

However, if Norway's banknotes lag behind in terms of security, it could run the risk of developing a counterfeiting problem, it said.

Norges Bank aims to put the new 100-krone and 200-krone notes into circulation on May 30 next year. The new 50-krone and 500-krone notes will be published in the third quarter of 2018, while the new 1,000-krone notes will be issued in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to public broadcaster NRK.

For the first time in the country's history, Norwegian banknotes will not feature portraits. Instead, the new notes all reflect a common theme: "The Sea," the central bank said in the statement.

A traditional, iconic design features on the front of the new notes, with a different maritime motif for each denomination. The modern, pixelated patterns on the back of the notes are built up around a grid system based on the Beaufort wind force scale. Endit