Cheque this out

On Jul 18, 7:51 pm, Paul Sture <p...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:57:16 +0200, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
Once upon a time I also wrote cheques, must be 20 years ago. Since then,
the banking systems (at least over here) has developed together with the
rest of the society and leaved cheques far behind.

Cheques were still common in the UK 10 years ago.  I am not sure about
now.

In Switzerland, as in various other European countries, the Post Office
is very popular for banking and indeed my flat mate in Holland had never
used any other bank.  In Switzerland at least, the Post Office led the
way in establishing a common payments system and once the major banks
followed suit it all fell into place.

The UK Post Office banking scheme Girobank was initially marketed as a
"People's Bank" or similar slogan and targeted weekly paid workers who
back in the 1970s were usually paid in cash, so didn't actually need a
bank account.  It quickly acquired a stigma among the professional
classes, not helped by the fact that welfare and unemployment cheques
were issued via their system.  "I'm on the Giro" quickly became a
euphemism for "I am claiming unemployment benefit".

My bank info is available here :http://www.jescab.se/Kontakt1.htmNoone
but me can do anythig with my account apart from making payments *to* it
if they like. Only *I* can make withdrawals.

That's common practice here as well.  I was very impressed the first time
I wanted to withdraw money from my Swiss bank that they asked for
official ID, as that had never happened to me in the UK.  I know the
privacy groups in the UK and elsewhere are anti-ID cards but they are
very practical things to have when implemented properly.

--
Paul Sture

Cheques may not be common, but there are organisations which would
struggle without.

I am an occasional committee member on a couple of small-scale local
voluntary organisations. They are legally required not to spend money
without the authorisation of two (from three or more) named officials.
Commercial cheques needing two from three authorised signatories
apparently provide a legally acceptable method of enforcing this. The
UK banking authorities were proposing to withdraw cheques in the near
future but that proposal has been withdrawn. I wasn't aware of any
broadly acceptable solution to the two-people problem, even thoug it
is a problem that VMS admins know can be fixed quite easily with
existing documented VMS mechanisms :)

Changing back to printing highish value stuff - UK-located Japanese-
owned car factories I have known have relied on Printronix-class line
matrix printers to print work instructions for each assembly worker as
each car arrives (it's more effective than robotics?). Occasionally
the printing screws up. Rather than something electronic to read the
printout, they had a button in the application UI that said "re-print
instructions". The same might be possible with cheques perhaps?

The ignoramus Jeremy Clarkson was once foolish enough to publish his
bank account details thinking that no one would be able to use them to
extract money. He was quickly proved wrong.

E.g. from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7174760.stm 7 Jan 2008
<snip>
Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun
newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told
people how to find out his address.

"All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not
take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing,"
he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times
column.

"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has
set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,"
he said.

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection
Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

"I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."
<snip>
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Regroup that carry
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    (alt.usage.english)