An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
UK banks set to vote on abolition of cheques
The UK's major banks are set to vote next month on whether to stop clearing cheques as consumers increasingly turn to cards and electronic transfers.
See article
If the banks vote to abolish cheques without first working through all the relevant scenarios where they are used today, I think they will be performing a huge disservice to the British public. The fact that there are still 3.8 million cheques used each
day means that there will be a lot of inconvenienced people should they switch them off too early.
I believe that there are a lot of person-to-person transactions that people will be uncomfortable switching to 'alternatives', mainly because those alternatives are not that appealing. I mean things like the giving of money as a present (across a distance,
say), payments for school trips, and so on. Yes, I know these could be achieved by the recipient sharing their bank account details so the payer can send a payment using online banking, but many people are not comfortable doing that. Similarly, we shouldn't
assume everyone is either connected to online banking, or comfortable with using it, given the problems we've seen on the matter of online security (and yes, I know some people will say that a cheque isn't very secure).
This is an issue where those in command need to really think about the users, before they put £££££s first. Over 1 billion events p.a. (currently) says there is still a demand for using this old method.
We shouldn't switch it off too soon.