SMARTPHONE CHEQUES BEING PROMOTED IN AUSTRALIAN MURDOCH PRESS

Sophie Elsworth wrote a story for the Rupert Murdoch tabloid, 'news' in which it is claimed that smartphones may be an answer to the problem of 'dwindling cheque usage'.

Reserve Bank of Australia figures illustrate that 209 million cheques were circulated in the 2012/3 financial year.

According to Sophie Elsworth, the Reserve Bank had engineered " a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate cheque use", but, neglected to mention what these attempts were.


Smartphones are being used in the U.S already for the processing of cheques. Barclays in England is following suit.

This would be a financially beneficial move for banks if you process the cheque for them.

This trend of getting the public to pay less to perform functions that are usually performed by staff is a growing trend.


Banks make billions of dollars, are bailed out by governments, charge poor people the most to use them, and actively look at ways to provide their customers with less and less.

Interestingly enough, the Australian Payments and Clearing Association, similar to their English counterpart, appear to be keen on removing cheques from the market place.

Physical cheques is a species of money, and removing it looks to be part of the plan to bring us into a cashless society.

According to 'news' "The payments industry self-regulatory body, the Australian Payments and Clearing Association's chief executive, Chris Hamilton, said this technology could be used by Australians in the next few years."

Yet, he follows up this comment with one about the adaptability of cheque users to the new technology.

"But the question is are the kind of people who use cheques today likely to take to a new technology like this?"

People can adapt to new technologies like tablets, smartphones, wireless internet, sat nav etc, but unable to adapt to the arduous process of taking a photo with a smartphone of a cheque?

Chris, Sophie and Rupert Mudoch's relevant editors think that this logic is good enough to fool you.

""There's no reason why we can't (use this technology in Australia) but it's a race between the demand for that service being available and cheques going away completely,'" 

This presumptive statement by Chris illustrates that cheques being transacted in their current format is not in the Australian Payments and Clearing Association's plans. We can see this because Chris neglected to employ physical cheques in his quote about the suitability of employing this so-called 'new technology'.

The payment's council in the U.K tried to kill physical cheques, a ploy that met with such a public outcry that physical cheques were revived.

We shall keep an eye on developments.