The Bank of England has given a deadline for the old £10 notes to cease to be a legal tender. The Bank is currently withdrawing the old ten pounds note from circulation. It has given up to the end of February for all who hold the currency to exchange it for the new note.
Nigerian banks are currently advising customers to deposit such money in their hands in pounds domiciliary account. One of such notice reads “Please be informed that effective February 28, 2018, the old £10, Ten British Pounds, note will no longer be accepted for transactional purposes.
Kindly deposit old notes into your pounds account at any of our branches, before the stated date to ensure that the old notes are sent to the UK by the deadline.
Meanwhile the Bank of England said that at least £2.1 billion worth of old £10 notes need to be spent or exchanged before they cease to be legal tender. The deadline to spend or exchange old £10 notes – featuring naturalist Charles Darwin – is 1 March.
Currently, weekly returns of paper £10s are averaging at a value of £85 million or 8.5 million notes, according to the Bank. To exchange an old tenner, people can either post the notes to the Bank of England, or visit the Bank in person in the City of London. The Bank will exchange all old £10 notes indefinitely.
The Bank says people can also try to exchange paper tenners at their local bank or post office. However they are not legally required to accept old notes after the deadline. The Bank does not expect all old £10 notes to be returned, because some will have been destroyed, gone overseas or kept as memorabilia. Counterfeiters do not seem keen on targeting old paper £5s and £10s, according to the Bank. In 2017, just 0.0054% of all ten pound notes were found to be counterfeit, and much less for the fiver at 0.0002%.
