10 Pesos

Vicente B. Villa e Hijos was a commercial house in Medellín — not a bank in the institutional sense — one of several Colombian merchant firms licensed to issue private paper currency during the late nineteenth century, when the federal government's grip on monetary emission was loose enough to permit it. Colombia's 1880s banking legislation, and particularly the chaos that followed the abolition of the free banking regime, created conditions where merchant-backed notes circulated alongside state and national bank issues without much friction.

The ABNCo contract for this series reflects the ambition of the issuer — private firms commissioning New York-engraved notes were signaling creditworthiness to a skeptical public as much as anything else.