MSE News: MPs call for cheque guarantee card return

flimsier

JuicyJesus wrote: »

Well, sorry to say, tough. The previous cheque guarantee scheme is now closed, and none of the banks involved issue the cards any more. Many former CG cards will have been replaced with their non-CG equivalents. The banks are not going to reintroduce it unless the government make them, and quite frankly that isn't going to happen.

Yeah cheers.

So what is your opinion? I've given mine. You've just been antagonistic.
Interesting this thread title, and your response. Shows the sort of person you are I suppose.

opinions4u

DVardysShadow wrote: »

I won't do on-line banking. There is no protection against getting a digit wrong in the account number for a payment and transferring your money to a random account somewhere - with no end of a job to get it back. The measures to protect against this - a public password - are quite simple, but it seems to me that this 'payments council' don't really care about making the on-line systems safer, they just want to force abolition of the existing systems.

I totally agree that this needs sorting.

In the interim, the joy of a test payment of £1 is an insurance premium well worth paying.

2sides2everystory

hermante wrote: »

Well a bank exists to make money, so it should do whatever suits it best. It's a different matter if the bank was supported by taxpayers, but that shouldn't have happened.

Supported by taxpayers ? Or not ? Supported by whom then ? What do you think you mean ? Have you ever heard of Repo 105 ? Here's one end of the stick from a Google search:
Repo 101 on Repo-105's - The Bankster Report

Or if you prefer, something from MSE's own archives:
Lehman Brothers examiners report

JuicyJesus

flimsier wrote: »

Yeah cheers.

So what is your opinion? I've given mine. You've just been antagonistic.
Interesting this thread title, and your response. Shows the sort of person you are I suppose.

My opinion is that the cheque guarantee system, in an age of electronic payments, was slow, fraud-prone, massively expensive, cumbersome, ill-suited for the purposes it was used for and generally far more of a hassle than it had any right to be. It was a system designed for an age where nobody had debit cards, ATMs were rare and person-to-person bank transfers took three days and required a visit to the bank to effect. Now that debit cards are a standard part of any bank account offering, and that money can be sent to virtually any bank account from virtually any bank account within two hours with just a quick telephone call, guaranteed cheques have little purpose and are far more of a credit and fraud risk than their utility justifies.

The sort of person I am is someone who evaluates payment systems on their own merits, rather than clinging to cheques just because they are cheques as some people seem to. Cheque guarantee cards have little merit, cheques themselves have slightly more but I know I would still rather deal in Faster Payments and debit cards than have to deal with the hassle of lots of little pieces of paper.

It is also fact that cheque guarantee cards are not going to be reintroduced without some sort of legislation, which will not happen. Banks don't want them back (for, again, very good reasons as stated above) and most customers couldn't care less. The consumer demand is simply not there.

2sides2everystory

You could easily get a job at a UK bank with blinkered anti-consumerist views like that.

pinkdalek

2sides2everystory wrote: »

You could easily get a job at a UK bank with blinkered anti-consumerist views like that.

It's their opinion, and as for anti-consumerist views, well it was the supermarkets who refused to accept cheques, it is the high street shops who refuse cheques, who are the anti-consumerists there?

What's the point of having a cheque guarantee facility when the majority of places won't accept a cheque in the first place, and the cheque guarantee card itself is a valid debit card!

2sides2everystory

More blinkered nonsense. And I suppose that the Post Office doesn't accept non-guaranteed cheques for passport applications because ehm ... why exactly?? Is the passport office going to issue a passport if the cheque bounces?

My parents are no fools but they simply have never used their debit card with or without cheques. They write cheques when they buy through the post or pay bills over a counter and also when they wish to draw cash at the bank which is what they have always used to pay their supermarket bills.

The abolition of cheque guarantee nonsense was just the right little push/excuse for retailers to take the easy route by making all purchases totally impersonal, and to enable them to employ a hoard of child labour to man the tills behind no-brain CHIP&PIN transactions. It means many retailers now discriminate against elder citizens who are not a fraud risk in the first place because they are careful with their chequebooks, and thereby they also toe the line preferred by their bank whose business banking charging system is also geared to dissuade retailers from accepting cheques.

pinkdalek

2sides2everystory wrote: »

More blinkered nonsense. And I suppose that the Post Office doesn't accept non-guaranteed cheques for passport applications because ehm ... why exactly?? Is the passport office going to issue a passport if the cheque bounces?

My parents are no fools but they simply have never used their debit card with or without cheques. They write cheques when they buy through the post or pay bills over a counter and also when they wish to draw cash at the bank which is what they have always used to pay their supermarket bills.

The abolition of cheque guarantee nonsense was just the right little push/excuse for retailers to take the easy route by making all purchases totally impersonal, and to enable them to employ a hoard of child labour to man the tills behind no-brain CHIP&PIN transactions. It means many retailers now discriminate against elder citizens who are not a fraud risk in the first place because they are careful with their chequebooks, and thereby they also toe the line preferred by their bank whose business banking charging system is also geared to dissuade retailers from accepting cheques.

Re passports - you can fill in your card details for payment, or you can send off the cheque, would the passport office issue a passport before payment had been cleared? Oh and before you go on about what if the application is intercepted and card details are stolen, well the same can happen with cheques, they have account details on them afterall, plus cheque books are often intercepted in the post, "washed" and used fraudulently.

It's nothing to do with discriminating against elderly citizens, or any member of the UK public either stop using it as an excuse.

Hasty1991

If we are not careful, we'll move on from the outdated technologies such as cheques. The Payments Council was supposed to be looking at alternatives to cheques when it originally announced their abolition - it is sad that we didn't get to see any decent alternatives before the u-turn.

The Guarantee system was underused and as already noted, archaic.

Glad to see the back of the guarantee system. Sad to see the u-turn on cheques!

2sides2everystory

pinkdalek wrote: »

Re passports - you can fill in your card details for payment, or you can send off the cheque, would the passport office issue a passport before payment had been cleared?

Of course not and why would they need to? If some faster than the speed of light young man in a hurry needs a passport by return he can use a different payment system. For most of us a week or two for a passport is just fine.

Oh and before you go on about what if the application is intercepted and card details are stolen, well the same can happen with cheques, they have account details on them afterall, plus cheque books are often intercepted in the post, "washed" and used fraudulently.

Well I wasn't going to mention it but perhaps banks should be more careful about how they issue chequebooks instead of issuing them willy-nilly so that most people with twenty years history like me have probably got four chequebooks on the go for my main account and have received no query about it from the bank. Perhaps credit card issuing banks should never have been permitted to send out cheques unsolicited. Perhaps banks are the authors of most types of banking fraud opportunity by failing to be rigorous about anything except their own bottomline.

It's nothing to do with discriminating against elderly citizens, or any member of the UK public either stop using it as an excuse.

Wrong. It is indirect age discrimination and it makes it doubly difficult for older people who have to make the types of transactions they trust. And it is not an excuse. You would soon understand that it is a real problem if you had cared to make it your business to properly find out what senior citizens want.

Can anyone tell me when active legislation preventing age discrimination in respect of provision of goods and services is expected to come into effect?