General > General Technical Chat

Cheques being phased out in Australia by 2030

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SiliconWizard:
Certainly, actually a bank not keeping records for longer than a certain time would be a feature for me, not a problem.
The two banks I use allow to download your transaction records over a certain period in CSV and other formats. Just download that, keep it yourself and you're all set.

David_AVD:
From my perspective it seems like some of the "cheques are better than other payments" cases from the USA are indicative of USA banking issues in general that should be fixed ?

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: Halcyon on October 10, 2023, 01:30:33 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on October 10, 2023, 12:27:10 am ---
--- Quote from: Halcyon on October 09, 2023, 11:34:24 pm ---In my experience, all the banks I've banked with allow customers to access up to 10 years' worth of transaction statements, instantly, online. If you need older, the bank can retrieve that for you. Most banks will also send out paper statements, if requested. Besides all that, you yourself can elect to keep all the paper trails you want by simply printing them yourself.

--- End quote ---

10 years isn't enough.

I know that here HMRC (Revenue and Customs) can demand paperwork (w.r.t. probate and inheritance tax) from 20 years ago[1]. Banks certainly don't keep statements available that long.

When daughter went to university I went and looked at my bank statements from when I was at university. I was able to see that her income-vs-expenditure was very similar to mine, with the exception of the "new" tuition fees. That gave us both the good feeling that she should be able to manage; she did.

[1] other timescales are 4 years for genuine mistakes, 6 years for carelessness, 12 years for “an offshore matter or offshore transfer”, 20 years for deliberate tax evasion

--- End quote ---

Again, this comes down to the individual. I can't speak for banks in the UK, but I know for certain that Australian banks keep transaction records, at least in my case, way back to when the account was first opened, which was far longer than 10 years.

If you believe this is a limitation for you, then what's stopping you from storing/scanning/saving records yourself? They are all available. If it's a requirement for taxation auditing, you should be keeping appropriate records already, if you aren't, that sounds like a "you problem".

I see this as a secondary issue, not one about phasing out an old payment method. As I mentioned earlier, other options exist, it just requires some individuals to change the way they do things, as opposed to this mentality of "this is the way I've done things for 50 years, I'm not changing now".

--- End quote ---

It is indeed tangential to the issue of cheques.

Banks might or might not keep records for 50 years, but I'll bet it would be impossible to access them. I recently closed an executor account. The bank gave us a ZIP file of transactions, and now we can't access the statements online. Unsurprisingly we had anticipated that, and downloaded the PDFs before closing the account.

A relatively small number of people can't change the way they do things, for various reasons. Just saying "tough, I don't need it, sod off" is unacceptably inhumane. An analogous situation over here is that when "shared space streets" were introduced, they exclude blind people. Why? Because their guide (seeing-eye) dogs and long sticks require kerbs. An official response was "re-train the guide dogs", even though that is impossible. As a result regulations have been tightened to make shared space streets difficult to implement.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: coppice on October 10, 2023, 02:59:54 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on October 09, 2023, 11:22:59 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on October 09, 2023, 11:02:38 pm ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on October 09, 2023, 10:11:06 pm ---I find it amusing here when those ahead of me in the grocery checkout aisle take a much longer time to pay on-line than it takes me to pay cash.
(Of course, those who pay by check take even longer.)

--- End quote ---
What kind of antique validation systems do your stores use? There are places in the UK where a card takes 30s to validate a transaction, like its some 1980s dial up terminal. Those are used in places with infrequent transactions. However, in high traffic places, like supermarkets, where the transaction time really matters, it only takes a second or two, especially for tap and go transactions, where I don't even need to tap in a PIN.

--- End quote ---
Latency in increased where the terminal has to make a connection to something that will authorise the transaction. Connections via a cell phone make that particularly slow and annoyimg.

Latency is decreased where the merchant decides to "self authorise" a transaction without involving another part of the astoundingly complex (and expensive!) payments ecosystem. Supermarkets probably use a very local (=fast) algorithm like "PIN OK" and "previously used in this store without problem" therefore we'll assume it is OK this time".

So having good infrastructure isn't the source of the speed, rather avoiding using the infrastructure is the key speedup.

--- End quote ---
Er, no. I've accidentally let my current account run to zero a couple of times, and the supermarket rejected my payment in a second or two. I went to my phone, moved more money into my current account, reran the payment after the minute or two which that took, and it went through.

--- End quote ---

"One swallow does not make it summer".

I've never experienced any of that, but then I use a credit card not a debit card.

tggzzz:
Let's sum up this thread...

* I don't use cheques, so they are useless
* I don't use cheques, so neither should you
* I don't need to use cheques, so there are no cases in which other people might need to use them
* I use expensive and fragile technology for banking, so you should too
* cheques are expensive to process:
* per cheque - no figures given
* in aggregate for all cheques - no figures given
* relative to other payment mechanisms - no figures given
* relative to the other expenses required in banking
* due to fraud - no figures given, either for cheque fraud or for frauds not involving cheques (Social engineering? What's that?)
* people that use cheques can be discounted and ignored, since they are old/inflexible/whatever
Those points are either unproven or morally and ethically repugnant.

I was taught to help and look after the less able and fortunate in society. Unfortunately the bastard libertarian "screw you, I'm alright" mindset has become dominant.

And we'll ignore the real financial benefits that CEOs and shareholders will get by removing cheques. I wonder why the banks don't mention those when they propose removing cheques?

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