Electronic Payment System Universal

Electronic Payment System Universal

Electronic Payment System Universal

The Bank Clearing System remains a ponderous process to the ordinary individual in the street accustomed to an electronic age when online payments are made in minutes rather than days.

Banks in the UK continue to keep to the established five working days rule before a cheque is cleared, which adds up to seven days including Saturday and Sunday.

Curiously at a time when banks are asking customers to do more online in order to speed up the financial services available, why are they themselves following a laborious manual practice when handling cheques instead of simply using secure electronic transfer?

Electronic banking features

In 2004 the Australian Bankers Association announced that since 1999 banks had adopted new electronic procedures to speed up the processing of cheques, reducing the time by at least two working days. This process removed the manual necessity of sending a cheque to the paying bank before the process could begin.

The reason for this new found banking capability was directly related to the widespread use of computers that made the faster processing of cheques feasible.

However, in an electronic age that allows payments to be made in minutes dependent on whether there are sufficient funds, banks continue to create an unnecessary delay with cheques.

Apparently although some information about a cheque can be transmitted electronically, cheques remain a paper based system that requires their physical transportation from one bank to another before the financial process can be properly completed.