Bank of France building large scale automated banknote production facility
The Banque de France has announced the construction of new banknote printworks on the site of its paper mill in Vic-le-Comte (Puy-de Dôme).
The Banque de France, or Bank of France, has launched a large-scale project to build a new plant in Vic-Le-Comte, France, which already houses a paper mill, creating a global banknote production hub at the cutting edge of technological innovation.
The €220 million industrial investment aims to meet three challenges:
Perpetuate the sovereign activity of banknote production in France, whereas several European countries have recently given up on it.
Develop an industrial tool aligned with the national climate and energy objectives, amplified by the crisis in Ukraine.
Improve the working conditions and the competitiveness of existing banknote printing in a context of increasingly acute public and private competition.
The new facilities will enable the optimization of printing processes, thanks to the acquisition of new state-of-the-art equipment. The investment and plans to enhance competitiveness will improve printing’s economic efficiency. The renovation will reduce the environmental footprint by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50%. The new facilities will also enhance the working environment for employees.
Plans contemplate the transfer of banknote printing activities to the new site for 2026.
This investment represents a significant effort to mobilize public money (€220 million); it makes sense if it enables the printing of banknotes at the best price in the long term. France will then have the most modern, efficient, and environmentally sustainable public banknote production centre in Europe.
Le Figaro and Agence France-Presse report that the Banque de France expects its new plant to be ready in 2026. It is located in Vic-le-Comte, in the Auvergne region of central France 275 miles south of Paris. It will replace the current plant about 18 miles away in Chamalières that is over a century old and was the scene of a violent but nonfatal fire on Feb. 9. The new facility will be located on the site of the Banque de France’s paper mill. The bank employs 300 people at the mill and 700 at its printing works.
Construction was approved by a unanimous vote of the bank’s general council. It was envisaged for several years, even long before the fire, and is expected to cost €220 million.
France will have, the bank said in a statement, “the most modern, efficient and environmentally friendly public banknote production facility in Europe.” Its aim is to “improve working conditions and competitiveness in the production of banknotes, mainly euros and CFA francs, and to guarantee the sovereignty of this sensitive production.”
The new, highly secure building will house both printing and logistics activities. Process automation will supply a logistics system including a high-bay warehouse served by four stacker cranes within an automated “greenhouse”.
Horizontal transportation material flow management will be handled by a fleet of automated guided vehicles and/or autonomous mobile robots comprising 10 AGV-AMRs Loadstar machines equipped with roller conveyors, as well as 10 GL 10.1 AGVs.
The system will be managed by a sophisticated Warehouse Control System developed for control and visualization of all equipment and logistics operations within the site.
This ambitious project will enable the Bank of France to maintain its competitiveness and secure the future of its banknote business, while creating a site that is highly secure, modern, and environmentally friendly.
In 2017, The Bank of France implemented an innovative fully automated logistics system at the Banque’s Fiduciary Center in La Courneuve, where over 1 billion banknotes are checked and stored every year.
In 2015, the Banque de France spun off its paper mill into a separate legal entity, Europafi. Europafi is the leading publicly-owned paper mill in Europe, and the Eurosystem’s largest manufacturer of banknotes, having produced a total of almost 24 billion banknotes since the euro’s launch in 2002 (22.5% of the total volume to date). Currently, banknote production takes place in two sites: the paper mill is in Vic-le-Comte, and the printworks are in nearby Chamalières, both in the Auvergne region.
The Banque de France is also a key player in the international banknote market. Each year, Europafi allocates more than half of its capacity to manufacture banknotes and security documents for printing plants other than the Banque de France. The same is true for the Chamalières printworks, where more than half of the capacity goes to printing currencies other than the euro for some twenty countries around the world.
