MSE News: Cheques to disappear by October 2018

paulwf

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.

If they have a business bank account they can take BACS payments. It would be easier and cheaper for their accounts dept to run through their statement and reconcile BACS from customers rather than process cheques.

Their accounts dept is just being old fashioned. Either due to age or lack of training and motivation what becomes mainstream for "the man in the street" can take 10 or more years to become the culture in some offices. There are still people who would rather print and fax off a document rather than just email the PDF they had to print out. Hopefully 2018 will be long enough for most offices to have caught up with the culture shift.

Slinky

Heaven help you if you lose your mobile phone........

moniker_2

paulwf wrote: »

The culture in the UK will also need to shift but we'll soon get used to it. Anyone remember the fuss over chip and pin which now seems the most trivial of changes? I lived in Sweden for a while and I'm not sure but I don't think they had cheques, certainly handing out bank codes was quite common for personal payments...and that was 6 years ago!

I, too, have lived in Sweden although only 4 years ago. No, they don't have cheques. It's all cards and electronic payments but their electronic payment system is quite a bit smarter and safe than BACS/CHAPS/FP. Suppliers never give out their bank account details. Instead they give out a virtual account number called a bank giro number that can only be used to pay in to an account, not for taking money out. And being virtual, it can easily be directed to a different bank account if the supplier would switch to a different bank or branch and the customers paying in would be none the wiser.

The IBANs used for SEPA euro payments are intended to work in a similar manner although the British banks include the sort code and account number clearly visible in them while a Swedish bank does not.

I personally dislike receiving cheques. They just create a lot of extra work for me and are generally a nuisance.

moniker_2

mama67 wrote: »

i have just stated that couldn't pay online.

When cheques are being withdrawn you will most likely be able to. Don't expect tomorrow to be like today.

John_Pierpoint

paulwf wrote: »

Of course people wouldn't accept the abolishment of cash as there isn't a direct and more importantly convenient replacement for it. There are replacements for cheques and they are better...a couple of hours to transfer a BACS rather than waiting until you are next in town on a weekday to cash a cheque then wait a few working days to see if it will clear or not.

Oyster cards?

But when you are out of cash, as I remember being on a notorious Friday in 1987, with all the banks "shut" because of the weather has stopped their computer networks. You can still go down the pub and get mine host to cash a cheque!

All this high tech stuff needs electricity and an army of bank staff to work. When the Irish bank staff went on strike (about 40 years ago) they were eventually forced back to work because everyone could simply carry on using the 350 year old bill of exchange system - mind you several of those cheques eventually bounced leaving someone somewhere up the chain to carry the can.

http://www2.bc.edu/~murphyro/EC204/Supps/SuppCh18.pdf

Nobody can turn off my cheque book and ballpoint pen; but they can turn off my plastic card
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/....html?t=332339

- I have fond memories of a summer holiday in Turkey in the 1970's, I was able to write "Euro Cheques". The Turkish banks & traders trusted me more than they trusted their own government, the cheques covered in "all previous endorsements guaranteed" arrived back at my account in the run up to Xmas. Does this sound familiar. Why has our currency devalued so much against the value of gold?

james_joyce

paulwf wrote: »

Of course people wouldn't accept the abolishment of cash as there isn't a direct and more importantly convenient replacement for it. There are replacements for cheques and they are better...a couple of hours to transfer a BACS rather than waiting until you are next in town on a weekday to cash a cheque then wait a few working days to see if it will clear or not.

I'm sure cash could be abolished by 2018 if we put our minds to it! Cash has its own complications including for example physical security. If the argument is "we have always had cash so let's carry on with it", why doesn't this apply to cheques as well?

Just because some people make a subjective judgment that eg BACS is "better" than cheques in all cases, that doesn't mean everyone else has to agree. Indeed some people will contunue to find cheques more convenient, at least in some situations. Are their opinions less important?

In my case I find cheques the most convenient payment method in some cases and BACS in others.

poppy10_2

BigBouncyBall wrote: »

elderly people don't get the concept of bank payments over the internet or mobile phone. my gran hasn't even got a computer let alone a mobile. How is she going to pay a plumber?

She'll probably be dead by 2018.

We shouldn't let progress be held back by old folks who are too stubborn to adapt to newer better ways of doing things.

james_joyce

As I mentioned just now, why are some people's opinions less important than others?

John_Pierpoint

poppy10 wrote: »

She'll probably be dead by 2018.

We shouldn't let progress be held back by old folks who are too stubborn to adapt to newer better ways of doing things.

It is not better for old people, some of them are proudly independent and can carry on until their signature degenerates and the bank notices.
Long before they get to that stage their wobbly fingers will be unable to key in the PIN number even if they could remember it.

Next step is then "put them in a home", where they will be miserable and costing the rest of us a fortune.
But I expect the technical nerds, who have worked out that it costs £1 to process a cheque have no idea that a significant proportion of the population have trouble seeing a PIN pad let alone using it.

james_joyce

The objections to cheques seem to be:

1) They are very expensive to administer, once you include the notional costs for fraud, 'inefficiencies', etc. I still haven't seen any figures about how much this total expense is, so we can see how it fits into the grand scheme of things.

2) The world has moved on, we all need to get real etc, let's all start using BACS or PIN numbers - but obviously we need to hold onto cash because, erm, well because we like it and we are used to it!

Forgive me for not finding either of these to be terribly convincing.