Banks, Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services

The campaign aims to collect the Estonian coins before the end of this year, after which the country will adopt the euro.

Currently nearly 456 million coins are in circulation used for making payments. As all these coins need to be collected, it would be wise to start as early as possible, estimate the banks.

“This is logistically a very complicated and voluminous task and hence it is reasonable not to accumulate all these actions to a short period of time, but rather to dilute them in terms of time,” said the managing director of the Estonian Banking Association Katrin Talihärm.

She noted that people would be wise to take their coins to the banks in October or in November as later such operations would simply take longer. “As Estonian cents have a low nominal value, we estimate that we will perhaps collect a smaller amount of them, but we have set ourselves the objective to collect 50 per cent of the coins currently in circulation,” said Talihärm.