Why there's a new 50-euro banknote

The curtain rises. The ECB's Yves Mersch officially presented the new 50-euro banknote design in summer 2016. Half a year later, the new bill is going into circulation. In a first phase, 5.4 billion bills will be distributed.

People have been poking fun at Britain's exit from the EU on social media. But the Britons have never considered changing the Pound Sterling for the euro anyway.

The new bill has about a dozen security features to make life harder for counterfeiters.The large number of fake bills in circulation is the main reason for the gradual replacement of the old 50 euro banknotes.

Some of the bill's features can only be seen under ultraviolet light. That doesn't make counterfeiting impossible, but it does make it harder.

ECB sources say that the 50 euro bill is the second most popular target for counterfeiters, after the 20 euro bill. In the first half of 2016, 353.000 fake bills were withdrawn from circulation. The Bundesbank displayed some novelty counterfeit bills in an exhibition last summer.

Giesecke & Devrient is the printing company producing the new 50 euro bills. The proces involves bleaching cotton fibres, washing them, and making them into paper-pulp. These are then made into long paper strips which already include some security features, like watermarks and security threads.

Banknotes cost between 7 and 16 euro cents to produce. To reduce wage costs, Giesecke & Devrient offshored it printing press from Munich, Bavaria to Malaysia. The company has reduced its German workforce a lot in recent years - with 700 jobs cut in 2016 alone. Pictured: a 2015 union protest against job cuts.

The use of paper money is decreasing across the European Union, as many people pay digitally online or use their credit cards in stores. But the European Central Bank (ECB) has said it does not intend to scrap paper money altogether.