Currency manufacturers face two major security concerns -- protecting the huge amount of money in storage before their transfer to central banks, and keeping secret their manufacturing know-how.

These security issues were certainly highest priority for the Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation (KOMSCO), the South Korean currency manufacturer which prints mainly banknotes, coins and other government documents for its own market as well as for other European countries.  With the risks of robbery, violence and extortion of key employees and the evolving threat of counterfeiting, physical security was identified as critical and KOMSCO sought a solution to enhance the security and safety of its premises and employees as well as ensuring manufacturing confidentiality.

The access control requirements of such sites are considerable.  There are many different types of control points, so that in addition to standard door controls, the system must also control access to more specialized areas, such as highly secured rooms containing currency moulds or trade secrets of banknotes.  These requirements made it essential to have an advanced access control system -- including fingerprint and iris biometric readers -- that is integrated with a CCTV system as part of the tender issued.

Several international security companies competed for this project, but after evaluating various enterprise solutions, KOMSCO decided to implement solutions from DDS.  The combination of DDS’ TPL controllers with Keico biometric readers, which provide control over ‘who goes where’ and restrict access to non-authorized personnel, was selected by KOMSCO as the most suitable.

The DDS’ Amadeus 5 software, which provides biometric integration as a standard feature, allows security personnel to easily define template management (enrollment and download) and reader configuration.  The software also features an alarm pop-up if an authorized user places another finger for reading other than the one defined during the enrollment.  The Amadeus 5 software was also integrated with the CCTV system from Pelco enabling KOMSCO to benefit from access control and CCTV.