The MDC, acronym for Mint Directors Conference, is a professional organisation gathering by membership Governmental Mints of the World, and exchanging information and know-how in the field of coins minting and issuing. This organisation has been founded in 1968. Following the MDC’s initiative, the Coin Registration Office (in short CRO) has been created in May 1970 and gathered 16 country members initially.

At this time, the task assigned to the Coin Registration Office was to allow members to consider whether a new coin would have any consequent problems for the coinage systems of their own country, or other member countries, and to identify potential misuse in vending machines. To fulfill this task, the MDC members decided to create a database. The Royal Mint of Belgium, MDC secretariat at this time, took therefore naturally the Coin Registration Office in charge.

In January 1971, a Technical Meeting was held in Hamburg in order to fix the rules and the way to work. On March of the same year, the CRO sent to its members datasheets in order to collect the information about their coins. On October 1971, the Belgian Treasury Administration constituted a mechanized database.

During the MDC Conference on June 1974 in Paris, the Director of the Royal Mint of Belgium made a remarkable intervention, in which he underlined the progresses, but also emphasized that all the members had to transmit the required data concerning their coins. This has been improved.

Then, in 1981, the CRO has been transferred to the British Royal Mint, which ruled the Coin Registration Office during 23 years. The database has been constantly expanded. On May 2004, the British Royal Mint handed officially the Coin Registration Office over to the Monnaie de Paris (the French Mint), which located it in its laboratory, in its Pessac plant.

Nowadays, 43 countries are members of the CRO, for a total of 47 Mints.

These numbers are growing every year. It is satisfactory to see that nowadays, central banks and mints do consult the CRO for their coin project or to signal a potential problem with a new coin project from another country, whether they are members or not.