20 Colones Banco Comercial de Costa Rica

The Banco Comercial de Costa Rica was a private commercial bank operating under the 1900 banking law that allowed chartered institutions to issue their own circulating notes alongside state-issued currency. This 20 Colones note falls within the period when Costa Rica's monetary system was genuinely pluralistic — multiple private banks held concurrent right of issue, a situation that ended definitively with the 1936 nationalization of the currency monopoly under the Banco Internacional de Costa Rica.

Private bank issues from this era are chronically underrepresented in collections outside Central America. The Banco Comercial itself was among the smaller issuers, and attrition from tropical climate and casual destruction has been severe.