New digital cheque system ‘to speed up banking’

new cheque digitisation system set to be introduced a week from Tuesday is expected to slash the time taken to clear cheques deposited with commercial banks, Central Bank Governor Dr Kevin Greenidge announced on Monday.

“Right now, it takes anything between three and five days. The goal for us, is to reduce that to one business day, so you can get your funds when you deposit your cheque, you can get it almost immediately, one business day,” Dr Greenidge disclosed during a press conference to review the country’s economic performance for the first half of this year.

“It is my pleasure to announce that we have sufficiently advanced the process, that we will implement this system from next Tuesday, August 6. So, from Tuesday, August 6, we will introduce this cheque digitisation payment system,” he revealed.

The governor acknowledged that there may be initial challenges with the new system. “Of course, with any new system there are going to be teething issues, birthing pains; and so on. There will be a testing phase that we must address, in terms of things like print quality, quality of the cheques and so on.”

Dr Greenidge stressed that these challenges would need to be addressed for the banks which are able to digitise the cheques initially. “So, in such instances, some banks may not be able to clear those cheques within a day or so. We have asked the commercial banks to work with their customers whose cheques present print qualities that are not up to standard; and we have given them six months to get it all done correctly,” he pointed out.

“So that anybody who writes a cheque will be able to benefit from the one business day processing clearing, early in 2025. So, six months from August 6, there will be that improvement. There are other spinoffs from the digitisation process as we continue to build out our digitisation process to become fully digital,” the governor added.

Dr Greenidge contended that the new system “will save everyone time and energy, and will also save the banks money”. He promised to announce other areas of digitisation as the central bank moves forward in making doing business with commercial banks easier.

He noted that over the past few years, the bank has been working to modernise the payment system, recognising that having a speedy, reliable and secure way of making payments is “extremely” critical.

“It is extremely critical in terms of the ease of doing business,” Dr Greenidge insisted, adding that it is also crucial “in terms of getting the necessary investment the country needs going.”

The governor explained that this new digitisation payment system was continuous work being done with respect to upgrading the banking infrastructure, having already improved the Automatic Clearing House (ACH) initiative to facilitate real-time payments.

“However, we recognise that Barbadians have different preferences how they pay, including using cheques,” Dr Greenidge told reporters. So, since October 2023, we have been working with the commercial banks on a cheque digitisation project that would then reduce the time it takes to clear local cheques.”

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb