24 Nov 2025 · 5 min
The Philippines is switching to plastic polymer banknotes, starting with the 1,000 PHP bill. They're harder to counterfeit, waterproof, last longer, and easier to sanitize than the current cotton and abaca notes.
Episode 164.
August 17, 2022.
1,000 PHP bills.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 164. The Philippines is going to use plastic polymer banknotes. So I've always found foreign currencies interesting. I'm so used to the green US dollar that I remember the first time I saw another country's currency. I was like, wow, this is really weird. I was in high school and I saw some French Francs, this is 1995, maybe 1996. And. And I was like, wow, that's really weird. And then I went on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to Brazil where they use the real. And I was like, huh? I mean, at first it was weird and then I was there for two years and it just became super, super normal. I've really grown to like enjoy foreign currencies over the years. And very often I use, I use a current or a most recent trips money that I brought home as a bookmark when I'm reading with my kids. So I'll get to continue to feel that bookmark for a couple years. Now I've a Mexican peso, a 50 peso note as a bookmark with my kids. It's interesting because it's not the same as the US dollar. It doesn't feel the same. And that's because in Mexico and in other countries, Australia, the uk, Canada, they're using a plastic polymer note. So the US dollar and the euro and when you touch it, it feels like organic, it feels like paper and it, it's like crinkly. The Mexican peso or these other ones, Australia, uk, they don't feel like that. They feel kind of waxy. And the, the Mexican peso, I hope we can get this image in here that I have it, it has a see through part of the note. Like there's a butterfly that you can just see through. And so there's, there's a bunch of reasons for this. One, the plastic polymer is it's hard to counterfeit. It's, it's not paper. It's harder to counterfeit their bills. Two, they're waterproof. So like you can, it's supposed to last longer. You can run through the washing machine and not have a problem. There were a couple stories years ago about people in Australia swimming with their notes. And when I sent this out in my newsletter, people from people from Australia responded and said, yep, that's totally true. We can swim with our money. It's not an issue at all. So now the Philippines is about to join these other countries in using plastic polymer notes. Cause right now they use a. It's like a cotton abaca note. That's the material they're using. So why switch? Well, they've had this idea of switching for a long time now. In the tropical climate of the Philippines, paper breaks down faster than it does like where I live in the. In the hot, dry desert. And so their money just breaks down and they have to produce it more often, which makes managing the currency more expensive. Like most things, Covid has also had an effect on it. Paper attracts a lot of germs and dirt and moisture and it causes a problem. It's harder to sanitize where plastic polymer you can do anything you want to it. Like you can just rub alcohol on it and it sanitizes it and it's clean and it doesn't affect the note at all. All of this is really just kind of a side note. It's not, it doesn't affect you and the way that you work with your ofs. But it's good to know about the culture. It's also interesting to note that the Philippines is trying to keep up with the current economic situation of the world. They're maintaining their currency. They are trying to keep it modern in it's more modern than the US dollar right now. And they've already started distributing this. They started distributing like 1000 php bills which is about $1820. And I don't know how long it'll take to convert the rest of the currency over, but you can expect that it will happen. So along these same lines, given that I just got back from Europe and spending a month there and I've been there a couple times and one of the things that was interesting to me was Europe seems to be ahead of the US in a lot of things in a financial things like they were the first ones to do chips in credit cards or they were, they were not. I don't know if they were the first, but they were well ahead of the US and that where they're behind the times. To me it seems like they still use coins all the time. Man, this drove me crazy. In Europe I would give someone bills and they would give me coins as change and then I'm expected to carry coins around with me. And so like in Switzerland I gave someone cash as change and they gave me nine Swiss francs which is about nine US dollars in coins, like a five coin and two two chf coins. I was like, I don't know what to do. With these. I don't want these in my pocket. I don't want to carry them around. So those coins are in my house today because my kids wanted them, and so they brought them home. They carried them all across Europe with them on their bikes, and they brought them home. And here I have three coins sitting here that are completely worthless to me. It's about $9, which, you know, is not insignificant. My kids think it's awesome. I think it's kind of silly, but that's how Europe is still doing it.
