Cheques: Cancelled Suppression
- With no realistic alternative to the use of cheques, the UK payment governance institution cancelled its decision to drop them in October 2018. In November 2010, the UK Payments Council, which gathers the largest British banks, announced it was trying to find an alternative to cheques in order to remedy its natural decline.
- Considering the hostility of the government’s Treasury Select Committee, the Council first admitted that the replacement solution had to be paper-based. This month, its research concluded there was no feasible alternative. Cheques are then maintained.
- 2018 was envisaged by the British banks, yet, it was only but a projection based on the decreasing use of cheques. By 2018, their proportion should be so insignificant that disabling them would only have been a way to confirm this natural evolution, in favour of debit cards and direct debits. In Belgium, a likewise evolution took place: it worked as cheques started being charged when the country switched to euro, but they were not dropped. The local bank card BC-MC was an alternative praised by the commerce sector.