Hard to say goodbye to cheques when they remain cheap to use

SINGAPORE is on track to become cheque-free by 2025, but it may be worth looking at cheque-processing fees and how they can be refined to smoothen the path towards attaining this goal.

For context, the number of cheques processed by the banks has declined 8 per cent yearly from 2016 to 2018, according to data released this month by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

This comes on the back of the roll-out of PayNow Corporate in August last year. The service allows for instant payments between businesses and government by using their unique entity numbers (UENs) as identifiers to send and receive money to a banking account linked to the UEN.