The Lunar New Year is just around the corner and among the most important things to prepare are new or good-as-new bank notes. How can you get them without waiting in long lines?
Come Jan 4, five banks — DBS Bank, OCBC, UOB, Standard Chartered and Maybank — will be opening online reservations for the coveted bank notes.
According to the Association of Banks in Singapore (Covid-19 safe management measures), an online reservation is mandatory if you wish to collect your notes at branch banks.
There will be exceptions for those over 60 and people with disabilities. However, these individuals are still “highly encouraged” to make a booking to avoid long queues.
If you’d rather not go down to a bank, you can also opt to get your notes from selected POSB or DBS ATMS from Jan 11 onwards. This method does not require any prior booking.
In a media release, DBS shared that there will be 64 of such ATMs across 45 locations islandwide. The service will be offered from 10am-10pm each day between Jan 11 and Jan 30, as well as 10am-1pm on Jan 31.
Click here to find an ATM near you, as well as find out the expected waiting time.
Please note that each customer can only withdraw three times during the DBS or POSB ATMs period.
What happens to banknotes that are not festive?
According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore MAS, around 100 million new Chinese New Year notes are issued annually.
Some may assume that these notes continue to stay in the system, but a “large proportion” of such notes — particularly $2 bills — are returned after the festivities are over. These are subsequently destroyed as the number of notes “far exceeds normal circulation demand”.
This can have negative effects on the environment, as it generates lots of unneeded carbon emissions.
Alternatives to New Notes
MAS has urged the public to switch to digital red packets as these are a “safe, simple, and speedy way to convey blessings to family and friends”.
You can send digital angbaos to any of these banks if you are a customer:
- Bank of China
- CIMB
- Citibank
- DBS Bank/POSB
- HSBC
- ICBC
- Maybank
- OCBC
- Standard Chartered
- UOB
Alternatively, consider sending a DBS QR gift card, a semi-digital alternative where a single-use QR code is printed on a card that resembles a red packet. The code is scannable by the receiver to receive the money.
And if you order your DBS QR gift cards online by Jan 16, they will be delivered to your doorstep for free.
For those of you who prefer to stick to tradition and dole out physical notes, MAS encourages you to reuse old notes as “most of the notes in circulation in Singapore are clean and of good quality, and suitable for use in festive gifting”.
This article was published for the first time in AsiaOne.
Source: Her World