An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
Barclays extends cheque imaging pilot to one million customers
Ahead of Christmas, Barclays is giving one million customers the ability to pay in cheques remotely by taking photographs with their phones.
See article
As I said on Wednesday, innovation should be about solving real world needs rather than just inventing smart technology.
Paying in cheques by photographing them is one of the those innovations that just work.
The infrastructure is tried and tested – cheques, camera phones, digital imaging, etc., but even better is the fact that the consumer immediately “gets it”.
It is exactly this type of consumer focused innovative development that will convert the more cautions and resistant consumers to a more modern payment solutions. As these consumer get used to using mobile phones for paying by and receiving cheques then
they will become more willing to use their phone to actually make payments directly.
Given that this is clearly consumer friendly and will also save costs for the banks, why are we still waiting?