Wim Duisenberg, President of the ECB, 1 June 1998 – 31 October 2003.
Wim Duisenberg was the first President of the European Central Bank, and his signature is therefore the first ever printed on a euro banknote. Every note that entered circulation on 1 January 2002 carried it.
| Born | Heerenveen, Netherlands, 9 July 1935 — died 31 July 2005 |
|---|---|
| Term as ECB President | 1 June 1998 – 31 October 2003 |
| Banknotes signed | First series only |
Before Frankfurt
Willem Frederik Duisenberg trained as an economist in Groningen and worked at the International Monetary Fund before entering Dutch politics. He was Minister of Finance from 1973 to 1977 and then spent fifteen years as President of De Nederlandsche Bank, from 1982 to 1997.
That combination — a finance minister who had also run a central bank, in a country with a long record of monetary stability — made him a natural choice to lead the European Monetary Institute, the body that prepared the single currency, and then the institution that replaced it.
Leading a central bank that had no history
Duisenberg took office on 1 June 1998, seven months before the euro existed even as scriptural money. His term covered the whole preparation of euro cash: the choice of the first-series designs, the build-up of banknote stocks across the Eurosystem, and the changeover itself, when more than twelve billion banknotes and coins replaced twelve national currencies in a matter of weeks.
He left the presidency on 31 October 2003 and died in 2005.
The signature on the banknotes
Duisenberg signed only first-series banknotes; he had left office long before the Europa series was designed. His is the scarcest of the four signatures on several denominations, because production of a given denomination and printing works did not continue in every combination after 2003.
A Duisenberg note is not more valuable simply because it is older. What matters to a catalogue is the exact combination of denomination, country letter, printing works and print run, which is why the first-series catalogue records those fields separately.
Where to look on the note
The signature sits on the front of the banknote, beside the ECB initials. All four presidential signatures are equally valid: the ECB has always been explicit that a banknote’s validity does not depend on which President signed it. The full comparison is in signatures on euro banknotes.
