Well awhile ago, I had a lot of tellers from the big 4 banks look for older banknotes for me with great success. Over the last few years, one by one banks changes their policies about recirculating older banknotes, first the Royal Bank changed their policy and had to send older banknotes back to the BOC, then Scotiabank soon followed, then TD and CIBC. The odd time and I mean rarely, Scotiabank sometimes let's me have the odd note that's in a teller's drawer, but rarely, I was lucky enough to get a 1969 $20 *EV note. But my main source was the Bank of Montreal, basically all the tellers would let me look over their mutilated and they would save older notes for me. Life was good as I got probably 1/3 of my CDN paper money collection from there. They would regularly get lots of older 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s, mostly 1954, 1970s multicolored series. Also got some 1937 series notes from there, countless AU/UNC notes, even complete UNC bundles of 1973 $1s, lots of nice 1975 $50s, and 100s, they even let me buy $1000 notes form them when they had them, they mostly got the 1954 and some 1988 series $1000s. But a lot of 1954 series and some 1967 $1s. There were a few times they would get large bundles of older money, i.e. all 1971 $10s or 1969, 1979 $20s or in some cases a whole estate worth of somebody's collection. There were a couple of really great scores over the years. Like the time I got a rare 1979 $20 BC-54aA replacement note in AU condition and the two 1971 L/B EET $10 notes. At the moment, I was about to score some series 1935 notes, mostly $1s and other lower denomination notes when BMO changed their cash handling system.
Basically to prevent robberies and other things, BMO limits how much a teller can have on hand for cash, this includes mutilated notes. They are moving to a system like the Royal Bank and TD, where the cash is dispensed from a machine behind the teller's wickets and everytime a teller receives money, they deposit the money into that machine, so this drastically limits how much cash they handle and store, sort of like 7-11 stores where everytime they get $20 or something, they drop it into a vault. So they aren't allowed to store up money in their drawers or safe below their wicket. They just changed over this week, so this means the last remaining bank that held notes for me can't do it anymore due to their new system. So I think a lot of banknotes collectors hoping to find some notes from their local branches are screwed now. So getting these notes from the banks are a thing of the past. Was good while it lasted, but I'm SOL now. Too bad, but with the BOC demanding most banks to send their mutilated back, combined with the prevention of robbery by implementing a new restrictive cash on hand system, totally ruins it for the collector.
