BSP unveils enhanced banknotes

MANILA, Philippines — The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) on Wednesday unveiled enhancements to the country's 9-year-old banknotes, which were meant to make the legal tender "more responsive" to the needs of visually impaired people and prevent counterfeiting.

“To further promote inclusivity and integrity in our currency, the BSP also took an opportunity to further improve our banknotes as part of global best practices and, at the same time, improve on its design and security features,” BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno said in a statement.

The "enhanced" New Generation Currency Banknote Series include an "optical variable ink" across printed values on P500 and P1,000 bills. The ink changes color and would make higher denominations more difficult to counterfeit. 

Security threads featuring indigenous weaves from various regions would also be present on P100, P200, P500 and P1,000 bank notes.

Additional tactile marks in the form of intaglio-printed pairs of short horizontal lines will also be found in the new bills. The feature is meant to assist the elderly and the visually-impaired to easily distinguish bank notes from one another.

The new faces of Philippine bank notes, which will be in circulation soon, were released on Thursday

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas

The NGC banknotes have been in circulation since December 2010 and as a matter of practice, central banks regularly change the designs and security features of money — on average every ten years — to protect the currency's integrity and beef up features against counterfeiting.

According to the BSP, original NGC banknotes shall co-exist with the enhanced ones and wll continue to be legal tender.