50 Peso bill from Mexico wins the 2021 Bank Note of the Year Award

The International Bank Note Society (IBNS) has once again selected the Banco de Mexico to receive its annual prestigious “Bank Note of the Year Award” for 2021. With well over 100 new banknotes released worldwide during 2021, only 20 were deemed of a sufficiently new design to be member nominated.

International Bank Note Society.- Unlike most years when there has been a clear favorite from the start, the vote between first and second place was nip and tuck until the very end when Mexico’s 50 Peso note edged Sao Tome and Principe’s 200 Dobra bill (slave leader Rei Amador, butterflies, sunbird and flower).

There was an actual third place tie between Costa Rica’s 10,000 Colones note (abolition of the army leader, rainforest, flora and sloth) and the Bank of England’s 50 Pound (Queen Elizabeth II with Alan Turing and his war code breaking computer).

Rounding out the top eight vote getters were Romania’s 20 Lei (country heroine with crocus), the Royal Bank of Scotland’s 50 Pound (social reformer Flora Stevenson, flowers and birds), China’s 20 Yuan (2022 Winter Olympics theme), and the Cook Islands 3 Dollar (Ina riding shark, fishing canoe and carved wood statue) banknotes.

The Banco de Mexico was again both the printer and issuer of this award-winning design banknote, which is part of the bank’s current G Series first introduced in 2018. The vertical format note is printed on polymer and features Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. The reverse image features a salamander found in Mexico’s ecosystem of lakes and waterways. The design continues to highlight Mexican cultural and historic characteristics with new graphic motifs.

Produced by the Banco de Mexico’s new printing complex located in Jalisco, which began operation just before the coronavirus pandemic, the banknote has significantly improved security features which coordinate the transition to a polymer substrate. Polymer banknotes continue to be popular IBNS favorites and are now perennial award winners.

Last year, Mexico’s 100-peso bill, depicting the self-educated nun and intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz with the monarch butterfly biosphere reserve on its reverse, was voted the Bank Note of the Year for 2020.

Past banknote of the year recipients include Aruba, Canada, Uganda, the Faroe Islands, two time winner Switzerland and three time winner Kazakhstan, among others.

TYT Newsroom