MSE News: Cheques to disappear by October 2018

savagej

by 2018 everyone will be allowed a card, if you are looking at it from the perspective of credit rating as everything will be authorised. By that time contactless technology will also be much bigger which I am sure will help those who have difficulty using a PIN due to a disability.

I have a friend who is blind, he opens his mail, sticks it on a scanner and it reads it out to him. I have seen pictures of a VISA card with a built in numberpad and LCD display on the back, it is rather like the new card readers in that it gives out codes to confirm CNP transactions.

If they can do that, I cant see any reason why someone cant have a talking card, watch, or mobile phone. In Japan they already have contactless technology in all of these devices.

As someone pointed out people are looking at the negatives, and I know some people dont like change but you can't stop it happening. The level of IT literacy of childern these days astounds me. I know it is only 8 years away but that is actually a long time.

Why not wait and see what is proposed as an alternative before shooting the whole thing down?

Extant

mama67 wrote: »

i have just stated that couldn't pay online.

Can't be paid online NOW. If they can no longer accept cheques then they will look to alternative payment methods - either online banking or some other method not yet known.

and what about thos people who can not have debit/credit cards.

Fewer and fewer people are left without debit cards - basic bank accounts increasingly offer them (both Barclays and the Co-op offer them - and they're companies who will accept virtually all customers).

INT1

mama67 wrote: »

unless the company u want to pay doesnt offer this option,

I pay my weekly milk bill by chq, don't like leaving cash out when not at home.

I have asked the dairy company if I can pay weekly by online banking, the answer is no it has to be monthly direct debit or cash or cheque.

The direct debit is all very well but you wouldn't expect to get your groceries each week then pay with a monthly direct debit

I understand that, but haven't Tesco stopped accepting cheques?
A number of companies will be phasing cheques out over the next coming years, make way for payments by electronic means where it's quicker and cheaper for all involved.

I wonder if Postal orders will be phased out too?!

Extant

keith969 wrote: »

This is all about banks trying to cut their costs and pass them on to someone else. In the same way as they are trying to get everyone to accept paperless statements while still sending you junk mail pushing their loans, making you phone their call centers on premium rate numbers instead of letting you call your local branch, etc etc.

So tell your bank you don't want their junk mail and ask them to suppress that marketing. If they really didn't want to waste money on paper statements, they wouldn't want to waste it on unsolicited mail either.

Branches cannot always cope with the volumes of calls placed by customers. The UK government and banking sector have made a commitment to universal banking, i.e. the idea that everyone should be able to have an account. The reality of servicing this necessitates moving some functions outside of the branch.

While there may well be other ways to pay, cheques have their uses as others have pointed out - for clubs, schools, small traders etc. If banks do try and phase them out, their will be an opportunity for someone to set up a cheque based service and take the business that the banks do not want.

This isn't the banks saying they'll stop accepting cheques while clearing runs on in the background. Cheque clearing will cease altogether. There won't be an opportunity for someone to set up an alternative service.

And yes, plenty of people have pointed out there are niche uses for them currently, as you mentioned above. But plenty of people have also mentioned that this is niche use NOW, in 2009. Nobody knows what services will be available in nine years time (or more importantly, in 2016 when the "go/no go" decision is made).

Alpine_Star

Extant wrote: »

I realize that it's very popular to be a "bank cynic" these days, but you might perhaps consider the last sentence of my post as well.

You mean this?

''Believe it or not, these decisions are made with businesses (the larger users by volume) in mind that someone who pays school bills etc. by cheque. ''

I did. The Confederation of Small Businesses who represent - amongst others private schools - is very much against the abolition cheques. So it can hardly be said that it was done ''with businesses in mind''.

Extant

aldo wrote: »

A number of companies will be phasing cheques out over the next coming years, make way for payments by electronic means where it's quicker and cheaper for all involved.

It's not just a matter of companies phasing it out. The death of cheques started long ago, when the Government started to push the electronic payments instead of the "Girocheque."

I wonder if Postal orders will be phased out too?!

Postal orders as they exist now are just cheques drawn on the Post Office's own account - sort of like a bank draft. They won't be able to exist in their current form if cheque clearing ends, they would have to come up with a different model.

Extant

Alpine_Star wrote: »

I did. The Confederation of Small Businesses who represent - amongst others private schools - is very much against the abolition cheques. So it can hardly be said that it was done ''with businesses in mind''.

Do you mean the Federation of Small Businesses? A lobbying group for business owners which would have a vested interest in lobbying against anything that would cause their members to have to invest capital in systems upgrades etc.?

The same FSB that lobbies for tax decreases for business owners, the removal of VAT penalties and support of flat rate taxes?

Why yes, they sure are an admirable group that is obviously unbiased.

Noble_Savage

To my mind there are two options:

1) We keep cheques as they are. Their use continues to dwindle, but as we've committed to keep them forever, banks have to continue to run a clearing system. They won't invest in it - why would they, if fewer and fewer people use them. (And, as we technically own the banks, why would we want them to spend money maintaining it?) As a result we keep an out-dated, clunky and increasingly unreliable system for shunting cash around.

2) We say to ourselves, "Look, this system is not perfect, let's set ourselves a deadline eight years away to have alternatives in place. This will make companies and people consider alternative ways of making and receiving payment. And if some of these aren't right, the deadline gives a very real incentive to develop solutions that will work for the granny, the milkman, the school secretary. And just to make it even fairer, we'll have a 'go/no-go' date in 2016, when we'll make the final decision, so if we haven't got the solutions in place we can defer matters."

Option 2 for me, everytime.

glider3560

Extant wrote: »

Postal orders as they exist now are just cheques drawn on the Post Office's own account - sort of like a bank draft. They won't be able to exist in their current form if cheque clearing ends, they would have to come up with a different model.

An uncrossed postal order can be cashed at a Post Office branch, as the postal order has a barcode which can be scanned at the PO counter. I would assume a system like this could still happen, but just without the ability to pay in at a bank.

Alpine_Star

Extant wrote: »

Do you mean the Federation of Small Businesses? A lobbying group for business owners which would have a vested interest in lobbying against anything that would cause their members to have to invest capital in systems upgrades etc.?

The same FSB that lobbies for tax decreases for business owners, the removal of VAT penalties and support of flat rate taxes?

Why yes, they sure are an admirable group that is obviously unbiased.