Julian Payne carries a lot of funny money. The 42-year-old turns up to our meeting armed with wads of bank notes that look like they may have come from a surreal edition of Monopoly.

The bogus cash helps to drum up business from central bankers and civil servants, he says.

Mr Payne manages 22 designers at De La Rue, the world's largest banknote printer, responsible for about 40 per cent of the world's denominations in circulation.

As the company's creative director, it is his job to oversee the design for banknotes, passports and other official documents from the idea stage to being ready for print. His team produced the recent plastic £5 note, the introduction of which was greeted with a row over its animal fat content.

After a backlash from vegans and religious groups, the Bank of England has backed the use of palm oil in the polymer £20, which will be issued in 2020. "The animal fat was very deep in our supply chain, three or four steps before we received the plastic. It opened a lot of eyes over how plastics are formed," Mr Payne says.

Mr Payne joined the 204-year-old company last September. Rather than the design agencies that his waistcoat and beard suggest, his background is in product management in telecoms.

"The parallels are quite useful. I bring a product management mindset into how you run design," Mr Payne says. " The people who work for me are the ones with backgrounds you'd expect, the fine arts and graphic design degrees."

It typically takes between 18 months and two years to go from an initial meeting to delivering printed bank notesThe Basingstoke-based company hires designers from industry, as well as from its apprenticeship and graduate programmes. It can take four years to turn a talented graphic artist into a banknote designer, Mr Payne says. "After a fine arts degree, you can often do fantastic portraiture, but how do you get that into a rectangle of 32 pages of a passport book that is secure and can still be manufactured at scale. It takes time to teach."

Graduate recruits spend time in a range of disciplines, from substrate - the paper and polymer that the notes are made of - to holography, to sophisticated security features meant to keep the counterfeiters at bay, such as threads, transparent layers and specialist inks.

The job can also involve working with De La Rue's team of "ethical hackers", who make fakes of the notes and passports. Unlike their counterparts in software, these expert forgers do not have chequered pasts.

"They are homegrown, and often come from the materials science background. Once you've worked in De La Rue designing banknotes and passports, you quickly work out how to counterfeit passports or bank notes. You are not trying to spoof it exactly, you are trying to get it good enough. The materials we use are hard to get, but can you get a bit of paper to pass off at the newsagent? That's what we watch out for, what's passable."

Mr Payne says that there's plenty of room for enjoyment, particularly for the officials who make the decisions on the faces that should appear on notes and passports. "Civil servants and central bankers tend to have limited opportunities to get involved in a creative process, we give them that chance," he said. "We make key pieces of national infrastructure. It's a risky job but we try and bring some fun to it."

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