Jeremy Hurst isn’t so sure..
Some of you may have seen the recent news about the latest Government plan to phase out the cheque as a method of payment by 2018. The Treasury Select Committee are looking into it apparently. Living in the online world as I do, I should be applauding this as a natural step in the right direction, but I’ve got reservations.
While it would be far easier for everyone to go completely down the plastic route, there is always something nicer about actually receiving a cheque in the post, whether it’s a gift for a birthday or the deposit for the greatest website development project ever. Yes, you have to go out in the rain to pay it in. Yes, people forget to sign them. Yes, they can fall down the back of drawers and be picked up with other papers. All the same, there is something tangible about a cheque that I like. The issuer has taken the time to write the cheque, in words and numbers, usually in ink, and always with a signature. The act of completion requires accuracy and an eye for detail, and a pen that won’t run out halfway through.
Indeed, cheques have been part of our society for over 350 years. They are an institution within the banking institution, and represent something good about paying for a service that one truly values and believes in, enough to take the time to write the cheque in the first place. I can recall crossing cheques manually rather than having the crosses printed on them (there might still be this option but I haven’t seen it done manually for a long time) and some of our readers won’t know what this means. After 2018 some of our readers may not know what cheques are at all.
As I said, I should be applauding this review but I’m not, which is ironic as building ecommerce systems forms a large part of our work, for a variety of clients selling a variety of products to a variety of customers. Indeed, our systems process millions of pounds worth of transactions every day, with not a single cheque to be seen. Even so, I still think that cheques have their place, certainly until the banks stop charging businesses for card transactions on a percentage basis anyway.
