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...

" I'm sure in the long term people will get used to it, but in the short term I think it's businesses like mine that maybe suffer most. "

Suffer from what? Cheques aren't being abolished, and won't be for at least a decade.

"I have a friend who works for one of the major anti-virus/computer security companies and he says he will never risk his money online until systems are much more secure than they currently are...."

When I complete my PhD...

SV - I had the same probelm with O2. Company switched from Vodafone, who had excellent coverage, to )2, with whom I cold only get a signal, if I was lucky, in one pary of my bedroom window - but normally I had to go outside. A bit awkard when you are trying to work from home.

It's not as if I live in the sticks either - I live just a couple of miles from Glasgow city centre in a leafy suburb!

It has improved though - although I sitll can't get coverage at my friends house in North Wales - beside the A55 but in her case, I suspect it is 'cos the house is solide granite.

Suffer from being charged 69p per blinking cheque tokyo!!!!

I know the banks are doing it as a stick to get everybody transferring money electronically. Fine, but it impacts me in a big way - that's all I'm saying.

Don't charge extra for cheques: offer a discount for online. It's the little twist that makes it acceptable...

That's a good idea actually tokyo. Next time I review my prices I might well do that... Thanks.

banks do bacs for personal accounts...i used it to pay my old landlord

I asked at school today whether they would accept payments online and the answer went something like this:

"No we don't. I know that cheques will eventually be abolished, so I expect we will get a chip and pin machine, but I can't see us getting that anytime soon"

So I will continue to pay for school dinners, trips and music lessons by cheque.

A pp mentioned the slowness of Windows. Instead of buying a Mac I suggest you use Linux instead. It is much quicker and not subject to viruses the way Windows is. Most techhies/geeks I know much prefer Linux as an operating system.

I also agree with a couple of posters about the need to improve online banking methods. By the time I have switched the desktop on, logged on to the internet, opened the file that contains all my (coded) passwords, logged on to my bank's website etc I could have written half a dozen cheques.

gosh, tokyo is cross about all this!

"gosh, tokyo is cross about all this!"
Laugh (why no laugh smiley)
Rome wasn't built in a day!

Ask your school quite what a C&P machine has to do with accepting online payments.

I don't see any point because the secretary obviously isn't familiar with the idea and DD only has another year to go before she leaves. It was this discussion thread that prompted me to ask.

Seems to me, from this discussion, that we all work in different ways, business and personal. And many of us are still waiting to see an improvement on cheques for quite a few of the transactions we undertake.

I thought about this thread last night when I was in KFC (I know ) and their comms system went down just as I, and two other customers, were trying to pay by card.

Our food had been ordered and was being prepared, there was an ever growing queue and DH and I had no cash other than a few coppers.

The manager ended up having to stop serving anyone who wasn't paying by cash. She kept hold of my card whilst we ate and then luckily by the time we'd finished the system was back up again and I could pay.

We were going on the cinema afterwards so if the system hadn't been working I'd have had to do a 10 mile round trip to get to a cashpoint and back with the money and got to the cinema after the film had started.

So, whilst I know that electronic payment systems work most of the time they are a royal PITA when they don't.

One big advantage of cheques over online banking is not having to remember so many ruddy passwords and security numbers. Just for my main bank account I have a PIN, obv, a security number, a customer number, a password (and they always ask you for a different combination of letters or numbers so you do have to think about it carefully or risk being logged out). Then there's the password and security number for any online transactions. I have savings accounts and credit cards with different banks Real headache. And I'm not elderly - must be very hard for people in their 70s or 80s.

Suppose I could put all my financial eggs in one basket but then I wouldn't be getting the best rates. And the events of the past two years have shown us that could be a risky strategy.

Even worse, you are not supposed to write any of this gibberish down. How the hell am I supposed to remember dozens of ruddy passwords and customer numbers and security numbers without writing them down? Yet, if you do, the bank will try to wriggle out of any disputes.

But this sort of stuff is easily fixable. Log in with your user name and a shared, not that important password, and you're texted the (different each time) password. Your phone becomes the token for the account. Log in with your user name, type your PIN (which can be the same for each account) into your phone, and it generates a password, valid for one login during the next minute (that's what I do for Paypal). No phone? Have a little tag on your key ring with a number that changes every sixty seconds: people using corporate laptops to access work will have seen those. Offer accredited password safes, which store your password on your phone or computer, protected by a "master" secret. There are any number of solutions, solutions that currently protect data far more sensitive and valuable than individual bank accounts.

Not sure about 'easily fixable', I will admit to a couple of glasses of wine but I have no idea what you are talking about tokyo!

We have such a tag for one of our bank accounts, but I'm not convinced that every company/bank account/message board etc I deal with online do the same sort of thing.
OH and I have 73 different passwords to remember between us, so we keep a coded list that is very well hidden.

I love cheques. For a start off it makes life easier when paying for costly school trips (no, I don't want to send my kids to school with a few hundred quid on them).

Also, whilst technology is fantastic it is not infallible. When my kids school switched to parentpay I was an instant convert...but there have been a few occasions where I have tried to top up their accounts but technical issues have led to a delay in processing the transaction and they have ended up going without lunch. So, I top up their accounts via cheque nowadays instead!

I have to add as well that many indie businesses who take chip and pin can not afford the tech to fully support it and I have waited ages in various small outlets for card payments to process - with a huge old queue behind me.

Cheques rule, especially in those final couple of days prior to pay day when you have more month than money

lowenergy - we are a small business and we have never been offered speed-it-up tech even for an extra charge, I doubt we would pay even more to process cards, but it is not something we have been offered.

"I love cheques. For a start off it makes life easier when paying for costly school trips (no, I don't want to send my kids to school with a few hundred quid on them).
"

I love online banking. For a start off it makes like easier when paying for costly school trips (no, I don't want to send my kids to school with a few hundred quid or an easily-lost cheque on them).

"t technical issues have led to a delay in processing the transaction and they have ended up going without lunch. So, I top up their accounts via cheque nowadays instead!"

It's a good thing no-one's ever lost a cheque, isn't it?

"we are a small business and we have never been offered speed-it-up tech"

It isn't technology as such. Large companies can agree with their card processing company to share the risk on bad payments. So rather than do the transaction on-line, the PIN is checked (which doesn't require a connection) and the card is sometimes checked against a list of known hot cards (stolen and compromised PIN). Then the payment is authorised. If it turns out that the customer doesn't have any money it's then down to the terms of the agreement between the parties involved.

Presumably there's competition to get Waitrose's business, so banks may be prepared to stand the risk; after all, it'll create an unauthorised overdraft and the bank doesn't lose anything like all that money. And from Waitrose's perspective, even if it meant they lost a small percentage of a small number of transactions, it's worth their while to speed up the payments and avoid the risk of a communications failure.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that supermarkets have merchant agreements that protect 100% of the money provided they've correctly processed the PIN, subject perhaps to a "floor limit" (remember when you had to phone up for credit card transactions over a certain threshold?) Whereas smaller merchants have to do everything on-line in order to get protection against bad cards.

By the way, not all schools realise that ParentPay can be used for school trips as well.

Do you work for a bank tokyo? You seem very knowledgable about using modern technology for payment methods.

PhD student whose area are includes payment security.