to be annoyed by banks saying I don't need a cheque booik any more?

[camicaze]

What IS all this about cheques being abolished and surely its unreasonable? Is it just me that still gets through quite a few cheques? School dinners, nursery fees, Brownie subs, clubs, party deposits - the list is endless.
I am particularly annoyed at how slow my bank are to replace a used cheque book as if I need to be eduacated that debit cards exist...

re standing orders - until a yera ago, individual payments weren't always identifiable to an individual person - the Chelsea Building society pay SOs from them rather than the person, so it was a nightmare trying to work out which payemnt matched which person. Similarly if someone changed their name/used a partners account.
So for an initial membership payment that was OK, as you knew who you were looking for. But for a renewal the following year you needed to check through a lot of records. Plus banks seem to sit on SO forms for a long time (several months) before actioning them, and subsequent payments weren't necessarily in the saem month as the provious year.
In practice we tended to assume someone was still a member for a few months after they should have renewed, which if they had cancelled without telling us, menat that we were sending out stuff to them at our cost.
With cheque payments it is easier to put a hold on someone's membership as you know if you've received it or not. Doesn't help where people bounce cheques on you, admittedly!

In Belgium (which doesn't have cheques and seems to function perfectly), we DO have electronic cash. It's called Proton. You load an amount up to 75 euros from your bank account onto your debit card and use it where they don't accept bank cards (banc contact, or only do bank cards over a certain limit). Thus, if I go to the baker and order my bread for the week to collect on Sunday, but spend under 15 euros, I use Proton to pay if I don't have cash, as I have to spend 15 euros to use the debit card. Dh uses Proton to buy lunch each day, and it means you don't have to worry about having cash on you.

It works well and means I normally have access to enough to have a coffee if ds has cleaned me out for lunch money.

"Surely it would be safer to make micropayments on the internet for subscription to 'The Times' etc. by using an ecash system which did not involve handing over all of your card details and CV2 numbers etc. for just a £1 payment."

Sorry for not coming back sooner.

As I mentioned on Thursday, I considered working for a start-up that was going to do this sort of micro-payment. They were too early: they wanted to leverage Mondex (failed) to enable purchase of things like MP3 music (1998: the iPod hasn't launched yet) and video downloads (down telephone lines at ~40Kbps?) The suffered from boo.com disease, spent all the VC money and folded. I think you're right, and a system like this is needed. I'm considering buying one of those pre-pay debit cards and using it for this sort of thing, as that way I never expose more than the amount of "top up" on it.

There have been projects to do things like premium rate SMS vending machines: you text the code for the drink you want to the number shown on the machine, and the bottle pops out and the cost is knocked off your phone, but there are some trust issues there which make it less than transparent.

Tokyo - Amazon UK seems pretty secure, but db ordered a Wii for his kids from Amazon.de and had £800 taken from his bank account fraudulently, as he's used his debit card to pay for it.

Dh found when he checked online statements the other day that refunds had been made to one of his credit cards that he doesn't use often, as fraudulent purchases had been made there. As we have the cards and no-one could stand outside our postal address to intercept the mail (they'd have to go through the Armed guards first), I'd be interested to know how this was done.

sounds fantastic scaryteacher. Can you also use it for ecommerce on the internet? The French were far advanced on us with credit card security systems. They had their pin system years before we finally caught up and implemented it. I am not surprised that yet again the Europeans (Belgians) are ahead of us with ecash. We are similarly behind the rest of Europe with the time taken to clear cheques.

Seems that our banks are not as proactive as the European ones. I don't understand why.

"There was talk of companies like Microsoft effectively being banks and running electroni cash systems. maybe that doesn't suit the dinosaurs?"

No technology company wants to become a bank. I know it's fashionable to deride bank regulation, but compared to the governance requirements for listed non-financial companies it's pretty stringent. Given the howling that Sarbanes-Oxley and its ilk produced amongst traded companies, the thought of Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs being subject to Basel II or FSA "Arrow" compliance would be beyond imagination.

And the idea of the banks acting in concert to keep out strategic competition is pretty fanciful. They'd sell their own grandmothers into the white slave trade for 1% on margins, and the idea that a bank would act against its own narrow interests to protect "banks" in general simply has no support.

I have to admit all my online shopping is done on UK sites, as it is so much cheaper for everything than here.

The Belgians are also very proactive about bank cards - you have to go in and get the new ones from the branch; they don't post them.

Most bills here are paid online or at the machine in the branch using the virement with all the details on. I take my car for a service, go and collect it and the bill arrives in the post later. Probably a good idea as I can sit when I open it!

I haven't looked into it, but I think there may be issues about electronic cash that may not suit banks or governments. I find it hard to understand why a common system hasn't been introduced.

www.dgwbirch.com/papers/ftvfr/012ecashimpact301.pdf

"Parentpay's working well. We haven't written a cheque to our daughters' school for a year or more - they use it for meals, trip, music lessons. It saves them work, gives them better governance and shifts the hassle of chasing bad cheques (which do happen) to the collector. Even in a small school (~600) it's saved huge amounts of work, more than enough to pay for the fees that are charged."
But you haven't answered my question. I know it works well for you, but how does someone persuade my daughter's school to use this system?

I have sent two cheques and some cash to school today - Lepra donation, dinner money and school trip money. I did ask about other, electronic forms of payment, prompted by this thread, but the school secretary didn't know what I was talking about.

How would you deal with this?

" They had their pin system years before we finally caught up and implemented it"

The French system was poor, though, which is why they've now implemented EMV like everyone else. It was developed in a hurry in order to provide a market for the smart cards being produced by SGS Thompson (in France, everyone is a state business).

" I did ask about other, electronic forms of payment, prompted by this thread, but the school secretary didn't know what I was talking about."

Well, that's a shame (although it's more a decision for the governors than the secretary). There are options: Parentpay and its competitors for a start off. If the school chooses not to, that's their decision. A school that's happy (say) handling cheque and cash payment for ~1000 people's lunch money is welcome to it. Over time, they'll find that a rising generation of parents won't have cheque books, or that the costs of processing cheques will become prohibitive.

claig, it's hard to know where to start on explaining why that (thirteen year old) article is total nonsense. For example, consider "I don't know, but I strongly doubt that MasterCard sends a report to the Bank of England each month detailing my online purcashes, so when I download software from a US web server and pay for it using my MasterCard, it doesn't show up in the books anywhere." The only useful part of that sentence is "I don't know". This was the sort of nonsense that used to circulate on the cypherpunks mailing list back in the days when Wired magazine was worth reading, in which governments would tremble in the face of the new market structures created by exciting comp sci geeks with personal hygiene issues massive intellectual power. If people seriously believes that offshore purchases with MasterCard are somehow dark secret channels for value (clues: how do you settle the bill? How does the merchant get paid? Where to the dollars get converted into pounds, and vice versa) then there's no hope for them.

Read the article again. The staggering success of Mondex (er, no). Airmiles and Loyalty cards as serious alternative currencies (er, no: and how is beenz working these days?) The "Tax Evasion" paragraph is gibberish, because he's describing nothing any different to telegraphic transfers. As well as "OMG we're all going to create crypto-anarchist economies and it'll be great and we'll be able to have sex with girls and everything" utopians, there were also "OMG they're all going to create crypto-anarchist economies and it'll be terrible and we'll not even be able to keep the value of a good cigar" dystopians. They were all wrong. They never explained how e-cash differs from cash and IOUs, which the existing system copes with perfectly well.

yes you are right, that was just something I found by googling. I don't know about the field at all.

I expect DD's school is in no hurry to change their system as there are less than 150 pupils at the school and the current system is easy and manageable.

I imagine that the high school will have Parentpay as it is a much bigger school.