Issuing Authorities
Printed on:
• Ship series all denominations
• Portrait series all denominations
• All commemorative notes
The issuing authority is the body that produces and guarantees our banknotes. In Singapore, it started with the Board of Commissioners of Currency, Singapore (BCCS), before being handed over to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in 2002. Either the name and/or logo of the issuing authority will usually appear at various places in a banknote, such as the signatory, micro-text, Kinegram, or security thread.
In the 1960s, different parts of our financial system were handled by different agencies—the Ministry of Finance took care of economic policies, BCCS issued banknotes, and other departments regulated banks and insurance companies. There was no single organisation in charge of everything. In 1971, the government created MAS to manage key financial duties like regulating banks and setting monetary policies. BCCS stayed separate and focused only on printing money—the rationale was that keeping money issuance separate helped to prevent abuse, such as printing too much money to fix financial problems. In 2002, BCCS was merged into MAS because by then, Singapore’s financial system had grown stronger and it made sense to combine both money issuance and economic management into one organisation for better coordination. MAS then became fully responsible for regulating the financial system and issuing Singapore’s banknotes. To commemorate this merger, special pair of $50 notes bearing the same serial number and overprinted with the BCCS and MAS logos were issued.
On the Orchid and Bird series notes, even though BCCS was the issuing authority, the notes were signed by Minister for Finance. This was because at that time, Chairman BCCS was concurrently Minister for Finance. The same signatory was kept for the Ship series notes, except the initial batches of the Ship $1, S100, and $1000. These initial batches were printed in the early 1980s, when Chairman BCCS (Goh Keng Swee) was not Minister for Finance (Tony Tan), and therefore these initial batches were the only ones signed by Chairman BCCS.
In the Portrait series, instead of the Minister for Finance, all the notes were signed by Chairman BCCS. This was the case until 2002, when MAS took over, after which the notes were signed by Chairman MAS. Among the commemorative notes, the 1996 MAS25 and 1999 Millennium notes, printed before 2002, were signed by Chairman BCCS, while the 2007 CIA40, 2015 SG50, 2017 CIA50, and 2019 Bicentennial notes, printed after 2002, were signed by Chairman MAS.
The issuing authority’s name—either “Board of Commissioners of Currency, Singapore” (BCCS) or “Monetary Authority of Singapore” (MAS)—has also been used as several security features. Its name appears as micro-text on the Ship series (except $1 and $1000), Portrait series, and various commemorative notes, sometimes in full and sometimes as “BCCS.” On some notes like the Portrait series and Millennium note, this micro-text is also hidden within the background numerals. The authority’s logo is also featured in the Kinegram foil on Portrait paper notes. Additionally, the MAS logo was embedded in the security thread of all Portrait paper notes—even those signed by BCCS—but this stopped with the move to polymer notes, which no longer use the clear-text thread.