Being from Canada, I for one welcome our new plastic overlords. I'm curious about the actual hand feel but the durability will certainly be welcome. Also curious to see how these affect counting machines, etc. I do a lot of work at large cash events so I'll quickly get feedback from the cashiers and cash managers on if they like them or not.
In Romania we also have polymer banknotes since 1999 (lower value notes are printed on a cheaper support compared to higher value ones). First editions were manufactured in Australia.
The ATMs don't seem to have any problems with them (but most ATMs were installed after 1999 anyway). The notes seem to be much more resistant compared to the paper ones, and when they get damaged beyond repair, they are pulled out of circulation and recycled into plastic items like garbage bins.
Aussie here. Polymer notes are probably a bit harder to handle for a cashier. They don't flatten well out after being folded up. They have lots of benefits to make up for it. You won't find yourself taping up torn bills as much.
There are 300 pieces of equipment with bill acceptance devices that have to be upgraded where I work but I've been transferred to a different section at work, my current job plus the out in the field, where there are 7000 more devices which have to be upgraded. That's just the hardware.
When the $100 polymer banknote is physically made the Bank of Canada sends the data to device vendors who use the data to create firmware to send to their clients, but they can only make the firmware once the Bank of Canada sends them the specs of each new poly banknote.
After the $100 note the least used by the general public then will be $50 the next least used. Then the last three which I would say will be released also from least to most used so: $10, $5 then finally the most commonly used is $20 bill.
Each time the notes are releases the device vendors get it first and make the firmware so that means five different firmware changes spread out over two years.
Add to that some bill acceptor devices have limited memory which means they may be able to hold data for one or two types of banknotes, different series version of the same denomination, other may be able to retain ten of each note.
It sucks but it's expected and it will improve security, I hear bill acceptance devices for Australia's poly money has nearly 100% acceptance rate of valid banknotes (100% rejection of fake notes).
I'm guessing since the notes are not paper there will be less bacteria (especially impetigo) contamination and shedding of paper dust which is a big problem if you work with currency.
Two recommendations - first, manufacturers of bill acceptance devices need to optimize their Firmware Upgrade process, while I realize not everything can be OTA (Over the air), no bill acceptance device manufacturer, can, with a straight face, make the claim that they didn't know that there would be new currency formats coming out.
Second, they should separate the core functionality of their devices (Scanning, pulling in the bills) from the identification process (Which Bill is this?) - LUA is a pretty traditional implementation language to do this.
Funny you should mention OTA I was speaking with a vendor just last Monday after some testing and he said there are plans to have our central system be able to push new firmware directly to the device, no humans involved. It's still in development from what I could tell more OAW (over-a-wire) than OTA. But as I said a lot of devices are old with limited memory and a lot still use EPROMs for storage rather than flash so the EPROM has to be removed to be flashed using a EPROM read/write tool.
But still the Bank of Canada or any bank or institution which makes a country's currency has to give the physical currency to someone to scan and input the data into an application which all takes time.
The vendors are certainly aware of new formats (series) but as I said they can't do anything until the actual bill is in their hands, I don't know the exact process but I know the vendors of the bill acceptance devices have to wait like everyone else. I'm sure a lot of it is due to security, giving some company a $100 bill and risking it being counterfeited.
The vending/casino business is not known to play nice so I don't think LUA or any sort of cooperation would go over well, I'm surprised IGT even allowed SAS to be licensed but I guess money was made.
I think you need to clarify your thinking which is why you got downvoted. You start out with 'it sucks' and finish with what's great about it. The product isn't what you're complaining about, it's the roll-out plan of the Canadian gov't.
It's more tedious than anything and we the end user are stuck waiting for government (Bank of Canada) to release the new series banknotes to the vendor so they can create the firmware which then has to be approved by my company's head office testing lab/GLI and then we get it eventually.
Meanwhile while all that is going on the bills may actually be in public circulation and customers are after us for having equipment that won't accept new series bills.
