The Bangko Sentral nf Pilipinas (BSP) is reminding everyone who still keeps old peso bills to immediately replace those banknotes with newly issued ones in any bank in the country.
BusinessWorld reported on May 13, 2017 that through Memorandum No. M-2017-016, the Central Bank is mandating all banks in the country to accept, exchange, or replace old peso bills from clients and non-clients until September 30, 2017.
However, in several reports from major dailies in the week of June 18, BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr emphasized that the deadline remains on June 30. “There are no plans to extend the deadline,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Scheduled demonetization
Old peso notes, which were from the phased out 1985 design set, were rendered unusable for transactions effective January 1, 2016. However, BSP set a 12-month deadline for people to dispose their old bills or exchange those for new ones.
Before December 31, 2016, BSP announced an extension of the deadline to March 31. In March, the financial regulator extended it for the second time to June 30, 2017 “due to public clamor.” After that date, all old notes that were not exchanged will be demonetized for good.
There are still about P19.2 billion worth of old banknotes that are yet to be exchanged as of February 28, based on data from BSP. That is equivalent to 8.6% of the total banknotes in circulation amounting to about P983.3 billion.
Are you still keeping old bills? Go to the nearest bank now to exchange those for new banknotes.