From July 2016 banks will have to start processing cheques as images, with all banks processing cheques as images by October 2017.
With this in mind, Barclays have started a pilot for selected customers enabling them to begin depositing Barclays cheques up to £500 via their smart phones. The pilot works with Android phones and iPhone 4 or later running iOS 6 and above.
The way it works is rather than trotting down to the bank with your cheque, you use the Barclays mobile banking app to take a photograph of the front and back of the cheque and it’s then credited to your account. Once you’ve submitted the cheque you simply write “Deposited” on the back, keep if for 10 days and you can then safely dispose of the cheque. The Barclays banking app will keep a historical record of the cheques you’ve successfully deposited.
This is currently a trial with a relatively small number of Barclays customers, however they have every intention of opening it up to all of their customers in due course.
If like me you hate the trek to the bank just because the occasional customer pays by cheque you’ll love depositing cheques via mobile phone. It’s quicker, easier and a real time saver. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can deposit all cheques from any bank via my mobile and never have to visit the bank again.
3 Responses
This is fantastic news, BUT I don’t understand why they are investing time and money in a dying payment system. Not so long ago, it was to be the end of cheques, then it wasn’t ending. Amazon has it’s own payment system that can be used with websites and Paypal can be used widely. BACS is also hugely used like when I pay my VAT (grrrrrr). The last time I wrote a cheque was when I literally couldn’t be bothered to go upstairs to transfer by BACS and instead had my cheque book closer to hand and that was about a year ago.
Unfortunately, cheques still very much alive. I recently HAD to pay one of the top 4 banks by cheque (for a mortgage arrangement fee) because they were unable to take a payment via card, or accept a BACS transfer. I kid you not.
S.