Renu­ka Singh

There should be few­er lines at the banks to­day as the ATMs are ex­pect­ed to be ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed and ready to dis­pense the new poly­mer $100 bills. Some banks made the mon­ey avail­able yes­ter­day.

This is good news for the throngs of peo­ple, who over the past two days, joined long lines and en­dured hours of wait to change their mon­ey.

At the banks in down­town Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, bank cus­tomers com­plained about the process in­clud­ing com­plaints about the charge to even de­posit mon­ey in the bank.

Peo­ple al­so com­plained about the poor ser­vice and ac­com­mo­da­tion for the el­der­ly.

Guardian Me­dia al­so con­firmed that banks were not just charg­ing cus­tomers the usu­al de­posit fee but were al­so charg­ing cus­tomers the usu­al trans­ac­tion and teller fees to change the mon­ey.

That cost to deal with a teller at the bank in­stead of an ATM ranges from $1.50 to $8 de­pend­ing on the bank.

Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor at Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd Nigel Bap­tiste yes­ter­day con­firmed the charges.

“All banks have dif­fer­ent fee struc­tures. The fees are usu­al­ly tied to ac­count type and trans­ac­tion type. If the trans­ac­tion be­ing com­plet­ed at­tracts a fee, it will he be charged,” he said in a What­sApp ex­change yes­ter­day.

He al­so con­firmed that the ATM’s were al­so still dis­pens­ing the old notes.

First Cit­i­zens too had some chal­lenges. Ac­cord­ing to a bank in­sid­er, peo­ple were en­cour­aged to de­posit cash in­stead of ex­change it for the new poly­mer notes. The FCB was al­so re­strict­ed from ex­chang­ing more than $10,000 be­cause of lim­it­ed stocks of the new notes.

That too is ex­pect­ed to change be­fore the end of the week.

Mean­while, for­mer Cen­tral Bank gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­baran yes­ter­day con­tra­dict­ed Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s state­ment that he could not re­veal how much the Gov­ern­ment on the new notes be­cause it would in­fringe on na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

“No it’s not a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty is­sue,” Ram­baran said.

“The dis­clo­sure of such in­for­ma­tion is pro­hib­it­ed un­der the Cen­tral Bank Act,” he said.

“You will have to wait un­til the Cen­tral Bank re­leas­es its An­nu­al Re­port 2019 in some­time next year to get a sense of the cost of is­su­ing the $100 poly­mer,” Ram­baran ad­vised.

Ram­baran over­saw the in­tro­duc­tion of the new $50 bill back in 2014. He was fired by the in­com­ing Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment in De­cem­ber 2015 and re­placed with cur­rent Gov­er­nor Dr Alvin Hi­laire.

Ac­cord­ing to the 2015 re­port the “new notes is­sued by the Cen­tral Bank amount­ed to $82 mil­lion”.

The Cen­tral Bank is­sued $85 mil­lion pieces in the pre­vi­ous year.

At that time the Cen­tral Bank re­port­ed that the $100 bill was the largest val­ue in cir­cu­la­tion.

“About 89 per cent of all notes in cir­cu­la­tion,” the re­port said.

The re­port al­so said that cur­ren­cy in cir­cu­la­tion in­creased by 14.6 per cent to $8.489 mil­lion.